Electronic interaction research 1988-2012 through the lens of the Bled eConference

Electronic interaction (EI) depends on technological capabilities that have only become available during the last quarter-century. The Bled eConference has straddled this period. A review of the conference's successive themes, and of the corpus of over 1,000 papers presented at the 25 events to date, reveals three major Eras, referred to in this paper as the EDI, eCommerce and eInteraction Eras. A trace of the developments in the diverse array of EI technologies and EI-technologies-in-use shows that researchers have focussed very heavily on economic concerns, and until recent years did so almost to the exclusion of social concerns. The paper proposes that EI research needs to seek better balances between organisational and human needs. In addition, because of the instability of bleeding-edge phenomena, empirical research is being published too late to deliver much value to practitioners. The prevailing expectations of journals that rigour be pursued at all costs means that the relevance of research to the real world has become a quite secondary concern to many academics. The EI literature is accordingly at risk of following the IS literature more generally into a closed enclave, in which academics talk to one another and no-one else. Key precepts for an alternative research philosophy are proposed.