If "research" is something done by humanists and artists, as well as scientists and practitioners, is there anyone who isn't a researcher? Is this, in essense, the Association of Internet Anythingers?
The #1 goal of AoIR from its outset has been, and I quote from our founding statement of goals: "to provide an interdisciplinary and interprofessional organization for promotion of scholarly and critical research into the social, cultural, political, economic and aesthetic aspects of the Internet." There are millions of people who use the internet but do not take it as a topic of scholarly or critical inquiry (i.e. "internet anythingers"). A look around most any university will reveal that there are many ways of conducting scholarly and critical inquiry other than science and social science, a small sampling of which would include time honored traditions such as philosophy, literary analysis, and artistic production and performance. Recasting these modes of inquiry as science or dismissing them as not research do not further our understandings of the internet and alienate those members of AoIR who use them as their epistimological strategies. Nancy