Sara Turing, a woman in her seventies mourning the death of Alan, her younger son, a man that she failed to understand on so many levels, wrote this remarkable biographical essay. She carefully pieced together his school reports, copies of his publications, and comments on his achievements by experts. But Alan Turing was a thoroughly unconventional man, whose method of dealing with life's situations was to think everything through from first principles, ignoring social expectations. And she was trying to fit him into a framework that reveals more about her and her social situation than it does about him. Alan's older brother John trying to fill in the gaps he saw in his mother's account, also ends up revealing a good deal about his own attitudes.In these few pages I will discuss some of the questions that may occur to readers of these documents.

Alan Turing's War

In 1940, after France had been defeated, Britain fought on mainly alone. The merchant shipping on which the island was dependent was being sunk by German submarines at a rate that threatened to force the UK to yield. The radio communications between the submarines and their base concerning their operational plans were being picked up in Britain. If these plans were known, attacks could be mounted against the submarines. Merchant ships could adjust their routes so as not to go where they would encounter enemy submarines. But of course the data was encrypted.

Alan was broad, strongly built and tall, with a square, determined jaw and unruly brown hair. His deep-set, clear blue eyes were his most remarkable feature. The short, slightly retroussé nose and humorous lines of his mouth gave him a youthful – sometimes a childlike – appearance. So much so that in his late thirties he was still at times mistaken for an undergraduate; hence occasional attempts were made to “prog” him.

In dress and habits he tended to be slovenly. His hair was usually too long, with an overhanging lock which he would toss back with a jerk of his head. The first thing to be done when he came home was to send him to have his hair cut. When he did take the trouble to comb it, five minutes later he would run his fingers through it so that once more it would be standing on end. At King's, for a time he took more trouble with his clothes and even subdued his hair. But when the war came he was seldom at home, clothing and sartorial advice were both rationed, and he relapsed into the old ways. In his last years there was again some slight improvement and he used to object to complaints about his clothes. The real trouble, perhaps, was not so much the clothes that he wore as the way in which he wore them.

The General Strike of 1926 broke out as Alan's first term started. He dearly loved a bit of adventure and so was delighted with the opportunity the strike gave of a novel mode of arrival at school – a new school at that. Landing at mid-day at Southampton from France, he sent a telegram to his housemaster, Mr. Geoffrey O'Hanlon, promising to report next day. Then he disposed of his trunk, and set out armed with a map to bicycle to the school. When he hopefully suggested the possibility of bicycling, I insisted that he should not attempt the whole sixty miles in one day, thinking he might be ruthlessly made to attend early school next day. He spent the night at Blandford at the Crown Hotel, where he seems to have caused some diversion, for the whole staff turned out next morning to see him on his way. His bill for dinner, bed and breakfast was purely nominal – six shillings. This unusual way of arrival won him some notoriety and was even reported in the local press. His enterprise stood him in good stead a year or two later; when progress was at a low ebb his housemaster, seeking some redeeming feature remarked: “Well, after all he did bicycle here.”

Alan's first letter from Westcott House, Sherborne, informs us that “Mr. O'Hanlon is very nice” and indeed he proved to be the perfect housemaster, towhomwe owe anundying debt of gratitude.

The aim of this book is to trace from early days the development of a mathematician and scientist of great originality and to record details from which a selection may be made by a future biographer. Owing to the enforced silence regarding my son's activities in the Foreign Office during the Second World War, there is, except for some few anecdotes, a regrettable gap of six years in the narrative. The book is divided into two parts. The former and major part is mainly biographical but contains sufficient scientific material to indicate the scope and depth of my son's research. The second part affords more technical particulars which might prove wearisome to the general reader: but these barely touch the fringe of his work on Computing Machines and Morphogenesis. His writings on these and other subjects, together with a posthumous paper on Morphogenesis, prepared by Dr. N.E. Hoskin and Dr. B. Richards, can be studied in the volume of his collected works, which is to be published by the North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam. I am indebted to many of my son's friends – too numerous to name – for their recollections. Here I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to various American mathematicians and scientists for their particularly courteous interest and co-operation. For their scrutiny of my typescript and valuable suggestions and advice, my special thanks go to Professor M.H.A. Newman, F.R.S., Mrs. Newman (Lyn Irvine), Mr. Geoffrey O'Hanlon and to Mr. Nowell Smith, who also read the proofs.

In this chapter we take a broad view of the social psychology of intergroup relations and apply it to the internet. We start by addressing two popular propositions about the internet. The first of these is that the internet is a safe haven for racists who, using the cover of anonymity, engage in hostile flaming of members of other communities. We can call this first proposition the anonymous cyberhate view of the internet. The second popular proposition is the idea that the internet is a hotbed of social activism where people develop plans to change the world using a device that spans continental boundaries. We call this second proposition the global activist view of the internet.

Let us be clear that there is some truth to both propositions and it is easy to find evidence for both of them. Our contention, however, is that both of the propositions are gross oversimplifications that tend to lead commentators and observers to misunderstand the dynamics present in this medium.

No doubt, social interactions supported by modern technologies have become an important part of our personal, professional, and political lives. At least since the last decade social psychologists have become interested in studying interactions that are mediated by modern technologies such as the internet. Research topics have focused on how computer-mediated interactions differ from traditional face-to-face interactions. One aspect that has drawn a lot of attention is that computer-mediated interactions have greater potential for anonymity. As a consequence, many studies have focused on the effects of whether or not the actor is identifiable to the people she is interacting with, referencing the SIDE model (Spears et al., 1990, 2001). SIDE stands for Social Identity De-individuation Effects. The model proposes that social identity moderates the effects of anonymity. It proposes that deindividuation can accentuate social influence when one identifies strongly with an online group but reduce social influence in the absence of strong identity.

When studying social interactions that are supported by new technologies, there is an inclination to start with the premise that social behavior is in some or all ways fundamentally different as a result of the technology. A notable exception is the research on the SIDE model, which started with the position that deindividuation and social identity have been studied in social psychology at least over the last three decades (Diener, 1977, 1979), and that we could learn from applying what we know from these research traditions to advance our understanding of the role of anonymity in computer-mediated interactions.

Social interaction leads – online as much as offline – to mutual, more or less equal social influence of the interacting parties on each other. Internet users send out information, summaries of subjective experiences, and opinions using communication tools. Recipients acquire unconsciously new insights or strive to learn or form an opinion about a topic. Research studying the facilitating and hindering factors for such media-based social influence has a long-standing history (for a summary of the early work see Williams, 1977). Nonetheless, the interplay between personality characteristics and media attributes as preconditions of social influence has hardly received any attention yet. Therefore, the current chapter will apply interactionism (Endler and Magnusson, 1976) to online social influence. The combination of personal and situational variables is relevant in the context of new communication media as in any other context, because individuals may respond differently to the specific situational conditions provided by computer-mediated communication (CMC). (For initial evidence see Amichai-Hamburger et al., 2002; Cress, 2005; Guadagno and Cialdini, 2002; Hertel et al., 2008; Sassenberg et al., 2005.) Hence, considering individual differences for the prediction of media effects will allow more precise predictions about the impact of CMC on social influence.

In this chapter, different types of social influence will be introduced and the features of CMC that are relevant for social influence will be discussed. Afterwards, the research on these types of social influence in CMC will be reviewed. This review serves two purposes. First, it will show that almost all existing research in this domain has focused on the impact of situational characteristics that either (a) are inherent in the technology (e.g., few social context cues) or (b) result from the social setting in which CMC takes place (e.g., the impact of group norms on a person's attitudes). Second, it will outline how the moderation of social influence processes by communication media characteristics is best explained by the interactionist approach that includes inter-individual differences (e.g., personality traits). Before this approach is described, the few studies that take into account the moderating impact of inter-individual differences between users on the effects of situational characteristics (i.e., personality traits or cognitive styles) will be summarized. (For a framework model putting forward a similar argument for CMC research in general see Joinson, 2003.)

Contemporary web-based communication technologies often present a juxtaposition of multiple sources. In January of 2009, for instance, CNN.com and Facebook.com partnered so that internet users could see and hear President Barack Obama's inauguration in one window, and read and write comments about it with myriad other viewers in another window. YouTube.com presents not only videos but also the comments that viewers have posted about the video. Facebook.com supports individuals’ self-descriptive information online, but also “wall postings” by a profile owner's friends, which may enhance, modify, or contradict the self-presentations individuals attempt to make. Sellers on eBay advertise goods online, and other buyers’ ratings of those sellers are a click away. Travel sites offer hotel listings alongside ratings and reviews by previous guests. And in addition to the overt comments and statements left online by people, the computational systems supporting these interactions often provide interesting statistical coefficients summarizing the evaluations or even the electronic footprints users leave behind: How many people rated a product evaluation as useful? How many times has a viral video been viewed, or a journal article been downloaded? How many friends does an individual have on Facebook? In all of these cases, there is a central message, and there are socially generated responses. How do these mutual sources of influence affect users?

New communication technologies are changing the manner of reception by which individuals acquire information from institutional, interpersonal, and peer information sources. Technology changes the temporal and contiguous presentations of these sources, and may in fact change the information processing and social influence dynamics among these sources; that is, the sequence with which sources are sampled or the simultaneity with which they appear may have potent effects on the information processing filters and biases. Such developments in communication technologies are raising new questions and resurrecting old questions about the interplay of interpersonal and mass communication. New technologies blur the boundaries between interpersonal and mass communication events and/or the roles that communicators take using new systems. Arguments have been made that the “convergence” of old and new media demands new and unified perspectives on traditionally segregated processes. “Media convergence” is a term that has been used to connote several phenomena that are brought about by advancements in telecommunication technology that may change some aspect of the communication process. Sometimes the term refers to the blending of previously individuated mass media: one can watch movies on one's computer, for example. We wish to discuss another kind of convergence: the potential for simultaneous communication via computers of both mass and interpersonal channels. Additionally, new and salient sources of information are present, and potentially influential, via contemporary online information systems: peer communication and computational summaries of social behavior. How these forms and sources of information coalesce, confirm, or contradict one another asks for conceptual and analytic frameworks to address them. New technologies invite research that will advance understanding of how individuals conceptualize communication and interpret messages, and how their attitudes are changed as a result of new mediated message forms and content.