As more and more of our daily lives take place online, a growing proportion of social, political and economic activity shifts to cyberspace. Social and technological change are inextricably intertwined and so the questions raised require crossing traditional technical and social science disciplinary boundaries. Yet universities have been slow to adapt. Although ‘interdisciplinary’ has become a buzzword, there are still comparatively few truly interdisciplinary programmes or forums on campuses.
The purpose of the Internet Research Network is to provide such a forum for students and scholars from different disciplines to collaborate and share feedback on research projects concerned with the Internet and its relationship to society. Our members include scholars from computer science, psychology, political science, sociology and information studies and, since I founded the group in 2015, we have been holding regular seminar-style meetings where members present projects and ideas to get feedback. This has worked quite well, especially since we kept the focus of the group intentionally broad to make it as inclusive as possible. Every discipline has its own perspective on the world that we need to step back from to make room for others. What has become clear over the last two years is that this not only applies to how different disciplines solve problems but what they see as important problems to be solved. Computer scientists deal with technical problems, and so therefore naturally reason that because technology solves problems, the better the technology is, the fewer problems there will be. Social scientists on the other hand look at a technology ask how could this be used for political purposes, what might it change about society and why could this be a problem? The world as a social scientist sees it involves social and political problems foremost, technology then comes not automatically as a solution but as a new variable. How to bring these divergent worldviews together? Seminars for project presentations are a great way to get opinions from people outside one’s field, but since everyone is immersed in their own fields they are not always accessible for scholars from other disciplines. A sociologist’s project on institutions in Internet regulation will have little overlap with a computer scientists project on improving encryption mechanisms. Therefore, we are planning to complement seminar meetings with problem-driven workshops on specific topics such as digital rights and privacy, surveillance and encryption, malware and proliferation, etc. By focusing on specific problem sets with a technical and social component, we hope to foster even closer collaboration among our members and make sure everyone gets as much as they can from the meetings. Lennart Maschmeyer
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