Review: The Psychology of Cyberspace

Written August 4, 2000

I discovered this book about two years back, when I started worrying about a possible "internet addiction". It is quite old by web standards (1996), but regularly kept up-to-date.

As far as design is concerned, don't expect anything extraordinary. It is black text on white, with a few graphics and colors here and there. The content is really purely text.

Let's get to the content.
John Suler explores the way humans behave, alone and with each other, in cyberspace (although he uses this word as a technical term, I don't think it needs explaining today).
His point is that cyberspace opens a new realm for human behavior, and has a high psychological reality. In that respect, there is a need for specific study of "on-line psychology".

The first page, rather like a book, offers a clear table of contents with little pop-ups that give you a short summary of each chapter (click on the bullets). The writing is academic, but nevertheless clear and pleasant to read. A few people around here *wink* will probably complain that the fonts are too big.

I won't summarize the content here, but here are a few subjects Dr. Suler deals with that might catch your interest:

Right... I won't reproduce the whole TOC here, but you get the idea.

http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/psycyber.html

::: discussion :::