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Product Description
This timely volume explores the psychological aspects of cyberspace, a virtual world in which people from around the globe are acting and interacting in many new, unusual, and occasionally alarming ways. Drawing on research in the social sciences, communications, business, and other fields, Patricia Wallace examines how the online environment can influence the way we behave, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Our own online behavior then becomes part of the Internet's psychological environment for others, creating opportunities for shaping the way this new territory for human interaction is unfolding. Since the Internet--and our experience within it--is still young, we have a rare window of opportunity to influence the course of its development. With a new preface that incorporates many of the changes online and in the field since the hardcover edition was published, the paperback edition of The Psychology of the Internet includes the latest coverage of e-commerce, workplace surveillance and datamining, all areas of recent intense public concern. Patricia M. Wallace is Executive Director of the Center for Knowledge and Information Management at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. She is author of an interactive psychology CD-ROM called PRISM and of the textbook Introduction to Psychology, Fourth Edition (with Jeffrey Goldstein). Dr. Wallace is also the principal investigator on grants from the Annenberg Projects/Corporation for Public Broadcasting dealing with language learning through CD-ROMs and the Internet.
Amazon.com Review
The Internet abounds with folk psychologists. People who have never so much as read a Dr. Joyce Brothers column are happy to explain, after their first taste of a chat room or online discussion, just why it is that humans behave in curious ways on the Net. By now, though, the Internet has been around long enough that a fair number of actually credentialed social scientists have given it a close look, and Patricia Wallace has done us all the favor of summing up their observations--and hers--in a single volume, The Psychology of the Internet. A clear, concise, and comprehensive overview of the emotional and behavioral dimensions of life online, this brief textbook should be basic reading for every armchair cybershrink.
Starting with a useful breakdown of the variety of Internet experiences (chat spaces, newsgroups, home pages, auction sites), Wallace moves on to examine the many ways these settings can influence the ways we act and feel. Such hot-button topics as flame wars, online gender-bending, cyberporn, and Internet "addiction" (as well as subtler matters like online impression formation and group dynamics) here get a levelheaded look, anchored in studies not only of the phenomena themselves but of human behavior in general. Wallace writes in a brisk, simple style--employing an easy blend of anecdote and science--and the conclusion that gradually emerges is just as straightforward: Contrary to popular mythology, people online aren't any more or less twisted than people offline. They just twist a little differently, is all. --Julian Dibbell
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