Social scientists in cyberspace: report on the founding conference of the association for internet researchers

Abstract

I've been lonely at SIGGROUP, CSCW and CHI conferences for the past ten years. Sure there were many good and friendly people, but only a few were my fellow social scientists. This made it both easy and hard for me. It made things easy because I didn't have much competition, and I could usefully take already-developed social scientific lore and apply it to cyberspace (see Wellman & Gulia, 1999, for example). I've had a great time hanging out with computer scientists, helping to develop Cavecat and Telepresence at the University of Toronto, and participating in CSCW conference. Yet the paucity of social scientists at these conferences (and their publications) made things hard because I spent much too much time explaining and legitimating my sociological approach to the computer applications folks attending. I found myself talking about everything, asserting: