The Three Ages of Internet Studies: Ten, Five and Zero Years Ago

PRE-HISTORY, 10 YEARS AGO Permit me as a tribal elder to exceed my bounds and think back to the state of scholarship in our field 10 years ago. Although Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz had published their prophetic The Network Nation in 1978, it was pre-internet history then. As one of the first social scientists to be involved in internet research, I went to biannual gatherings of the then-tribe: CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work), conferences that were dominated by computer scientists writing ‘groupware’ applications. Lotus Notes derivations were in vogue. Lab studies were the predominant research method of choice, summarized in Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler’s Connections (1991). I remember standing lonely and forlorn at the microphone during a comments period at the CSCW 1992 conference. Feeling extremely frustrated, I exclaimed: