Deviance and the Internet:New Challenges for Social Science
Abstract
10.1177/0894439304271527SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEWJoinson / DEVIANCE AND THE INTERNET Deviance and the Internet New Challenges for Social Science ADAM N. JOINSON The Open University The dark side of the Internet has drawn most popular attention in the media and, at least until relatively recently, a fair amount of the academic research effort. But, there has been a tendency for this research to be overly descriptive, to lack theoretical rigor, and to focus exclusively on a single online behavior without paying attention to offline concomitants. This special issue on deviance and the Internet attempts to go some way toward redressing this imbalance by focusing on theoretical as well as empirical investiga- tions of deviance and the Internet and by bringing together in a single issue a variety of devi- ant behaviors and academic perspectives. Sara Kiesler (1997) draws the distinction between technologies that amplify and those that transform. Within the area of deviant behavior, this is also clearly applicable--people have always lied, cheated, and stolen, but the Internet enables some of them to do itmore eas- ily, quickly, and cheaply. But, we have also witnessed the transformative effect of the Internet on deviance. New forms of deviance including warez