Citasa

Abstract

The article highlights the history of the section on Communication and Information Technologies of the American Sociological Association (CITASA), focusing on the early years. In that early period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emphasis was on helping sociologists adjust to the new potential of microcomputers for research and teaching. A tension emerged because new users of computing held different priorities than did those who were developers, specialists, or cyberspace researchers.

Abandoned not: media sociology as a networked transfield

“…The Communication, Information Technologies, & Media Sociology Section (CITAMS) of ASA has served as a strategic venue that connects sociology and communication, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2018. CITAMS has its organizational roots in ASA's Microcomputing User Group (MUG) meetings and became the Microcomputing Section in 1988 (Anderson, 2006). Declining membership in the late 1990s pushed the section to change its name to Communication and Information Technologies in 2002, proposed by Keith Hampton, Ezster Hargittai, and Anabel Quan-Haase representing a new generation of sociologists interested in the social implications of the Internet and digital technologies (Elesh & Dowdall, 2006).…”

CITASA: intellectual past and future

“…In this essay, I build on prior work summarizing the history of the section and its intellectual concerns (Anderson, 2006;Blank, 2006;Wellman, 2006) to provide a concise summary of the section's practical and intellectual development. I update existing histories to bring accounts into the current decade and discuss the contemporary intellectual agenda of the section.…”