Editors: Adam Joinson, Katelyn McKenna, Tom Postmes, and Ulf-Dietrich Reips
Publisher: Oxford University Press – 508 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
If you’re one of those people who has not lived long enough to know what the world was like without the Internet, then consider yourself quite lucky: you live in a world of instantaneous, highly enhanced, and visually appealing communication and interaction.
Before the Internet, among other tasks, you would have to:
- Go to the library to search for any information not found in the books you owned
- Dial a rotary phone to call someone; sometimes dial 0 to get someone’s phone number
- Use ‘snail mail’ to send letters, and wait for weeks or months to get replies
And use other very slow-moving forms of communication and interaction.
The Internet has made it much easier and quicker for us to communicate with people, search for information, and share it with them. This information is not just words; it has been developed to make it look rich and attractive, using video and audio elements.
And it is no longer necessary for us to be physically present at a certain place and time to work. The Internet has made it possible to do shared work without physical presence, such as the editors of this book and the writers of its content have done in developing this volume.
This book is about the psychological aspects of people’s behavior on the Internet, which in some ways is different from how they behave in person, but in other ways similar or the same. Various authors (contributors of material for this book) express different views about people’s behavior on the Internet based on their respective research findings and observations.
Forty-six specialists in various areas of psychology and other disciplines – business, communication, computer science, economics, education, media, research and social sciences – mainly from the United States but also from Australia, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, authored the 31 chapters of this book which are organized around five Parts named below.
- Part 1. Interaction and Interactivity
- Part 2. Groups and Communities
- Part 3. Personality, Self, and Identity
- Part 4. Psychological Aspects of Internet Use
- Part 5. Internet-Based research
The editors of this book write: “This change in how we do things as well as where we do them, is, we would argue, a sign of a truly transforming technology akin to the automobile or telephone. Travel and commuting should reduce as people increasingly work at home, university campuses will empty as students learn and socialize online, and the peer review process in academia will speed considerably without the delays caused by ‘snail mail’”.
On the other hand, a lot has remained the same after the advent of the Internet. “The social interaction on the Internet supplements rather than displaces ore traditional modes of interaction,” the editors write, pointing out to the work of Ronald Rice and his colleagues who authored chapter 2 entitled Social interaction and the Internet: a comparative analysis of surveys in the U.S. and Britain.
They also point out: “Indeed, the very fact that what we can encounter on the Internet can be very much the same as we know before, highlights the special status of the Internet for psychology.”
They add further, to emphasize this point: “After all, the widespread expectation that the Internet would introduce rapid social transformation was based on established understandings of personality and self, relationships and interactions, groups and communities.”
“That the Internet would transform these seemed inevitable, given what we understood about them: in fact as demonstrated in these chapters, the Internet can be used successfully to achieve intimacy, relationship formation, social influence and the formation of communities”
The editors and authors of the 31 chapters in this book have uncovered a lot of new information about personal and social interaction between and among people on the Internet, and they share their valuable insight in this book.
This is an excellent book that reflects the pioneering work of its editors and authors in this relatively new and exciting field of study. Most of us still do not know enough about human behavior and communication over the Internet. This volume fills those important gaps and has made our lives richer. Read about this new frontier of knowledge: Internet psychology.
Editors:
Adam N. Joinson is with the School of Management at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
Katelyn Y.A. McKenna is with the Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.
Tom Postmes is with the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
Ulf-Dietrich Reips is with the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
