Psychology of the internet

The Psychology of the internet by Patricia Wallace (1999)

Chapter 1: The Internet in a psychological context. Forums: asynchronous discussion. The user can catch up on the discussion and contributes his thoughts at any time of day. The conference rhythms can be very slow. Karl Marx: the power of technological innovation to drive social change. Certain new technologies have incredible power to shape human behavior and social structure. Chapter 2: Your online persona. The psychology of impression formation. As people began using email and online discussions forums more regularly, they acquired more skills at expressing themselves. Asch experiments; people tend to build schemes rapidly through internet personas based upon age and gender. Once we slap a label from our category collection on someone, we are not prone to peel it off or alter it much. Once it formed, we selectively pick up confirming evidence. Long transmission delays and a large number of users may lead the stranger to think youre hesitant or uninterested conversationalist. The lag in chat sessions and the need to type your replies affect the register, and though people strive for a conversational tone the pace is slower than one on the phone or in person. The bursty (Refers to data that is transferred or transmitted in short) nature

Psychology of the internet

of transmission makes it impossible to use ordinary rhythm norms associated with these other settings. Walther suggest that this feature might makes seem people colder than they would in a face to face interaction, at least initially. In a text-based environment, you cant project your high status the way you could in a visual mode. (1999) people who created home pages were not trying to create an alternate identity that differed dramatically from their own selves. a key feature is that they move in the opposite direction of what cyberspace postmodernist claim; rather than fragmenting the self, personal home pages are attempts to integrate the individual, make a personal statement of identity, and show in a stable, replicable way what the individual stands for and what is deemed important. Characteristics of egocentrism in adolescent, young people can be rather absorbed in their self-images and mistakenly assume others join them in that absorption. One feature of this egocentrism is a preoccupation with the imaginary audience. Many people seem to overestimate how much others are watching and evaluating, so they feel unduly self-conscious about impressions they are making. Chapter 3: Online Masks and masquerades. Liars do not emit any uniform set of clues to help people detect the lies. Over controlled movements reduced rate of speech, more vocal pauses and higher voice pitch.

Psychology of the internet Truthful subjects have a tendency to use words in a slightly different way compared to nontruthful ones. Their words were somewhat more likely to be complete direct, relevant, clear, and personalized.

Teens use plenty of current slang, and anyone in a teen chat room who does not might be suspected of age-deception.

Always maintain clear boundaries for ourselves with our personas in the internet.

Chapter 4: Groups dynamics in cyberspace. Group; is a collection of two or more people who are interacting with and influencing one another. Conformity: how conform actually goes, does group pressure disregard or at least question the information they receive through their sensory system. There is something about the computer mediated communication environment that reduces our tendency to conform to a unanimous group position, physical presence being one of them. A successful group needs a certain amount of predictability, and one way to achieve this is by inculcating this willingness to conform from childhood on up, whether we are aware of it or not. A computer-mediated environment strips away some of the features that contribute to our tendency to conform in a group setting. Physical presence is absent, anonymity is quite possible. (We must find other ways to exert pressure on you to conform to basic group norms if we want our communities to thrive. The use of propaganda *Memes)

Psychology of the internet

The lack of physical presence may make our natural tendency to conform weaker, and the opportunity to hide behind anonymity may weaken it further. To compensate, internet participants have adopted some stronger methods to encourage conformity or even demand it and protect their groups from chaos. One technique is to simply post some rules in an obvious place.

Netiquette: is the conduct that is acceptable in an online digital situation. Etiquette, may guarantee more easily the group cohesion.

Research in social psychology suggest that the phenomenon of group polarization may be partly responsible for the extremism we so often see on the internet, and the apparent absence of that moderate voice. An individual may hold a relatively moderate view about an issue initially but after talking with others about it , he may move away from the middle ground toward one of the fringes.

When groups talk things out, they can polarized toward one of the extreme ends. If a group members lean slightly toward one end to begin with, their tendency to conform could continue to reinforce that same direction in one another as they add their tidbits of information.

Another element that seems to make group decisions more extreme their individual counterparts is social comparison.

Group polarization can be quite high in the internet-like situations, especially when the people who are working as group members think strongly of themselves in those terms.

Psychology of the internet Groups sometimes suffer from polarization because members can be rather selective about what they share with the others. As polarization gets underway,

the group members become more reluctant to bring up items of information they have about the subject that might contradict the emerging group consensus. The result is a biased discussion in which the group has no opportunity to consider all the facts, because the member are not bringing them up. When a group feels threatened by outsider intrusion, the members band together more closely, enforce their own rules more stringently and develop negative stereotypes about members of the out-group. Types of socialization: Achievers, explorers, socializers and killers.(p 97)

Chapter 8: Psychological aspects of internet pornography. The implication is that aggressive pornography, particularly the kind that ends in a positive outcome, is not harmless at all. The nature of the internet is likely to trigger that dishinbition we see so often in other aspects of online behavior . People may feel freer to read erotic stories and view explicit images online when they might never have entered an adult movie theater or visited a live sex show. Chapter 11: Gender Issues on the net. The context is probably the main ingredient that determines the kind of language all of us use, gender may play some role.

Psychology of the internet Women tend to use more intensifiers, as well, with words such as so, awfully, quite, or really. Women ask more questions in conversation and show more agreement with the partner than men generally do. Women also tend to use

more justifiers in their speech, in which they make a statement and the follow I up with reason. The overall impression from these differences is that in some circumstances women may be using speech in more submissive and hesitant ways, and also in styles that emphasize the relational aspects of the social environment rather than task-oriented approach. Men used more vocalized pauses such as ahhh, errr, or ummm. Interruptions and conversational overlaps showed some interesting differences, depending on whether the pairs were same or mixed-sex.