The changes that have occurred as a result of the availability of electronic mail (email) and digital communications go well beyond those wrought by the introduction of postal systems, the telephone, telexes and facsimile. Verbal communication can take place with greater ease and clarity online than over the telephone. Additionally, users can now digitally save conversations in a similar way to the way in which they can save email messages. The tools used to access and navigate between systems are steadily becoming cheaper, more powerful and easier to use. The internet allows us all to maximise our engagement in discourse, study and recreation in a manner previously unimaginable.

Email is now required by many government departments and courts for the lodging of materials and for correspondence. Email is a fast and efficient worldwide communication portal. This chapter deals with legal and practical issues relating to the use of electronic mail.

Email

Email is one of the most popular applications of the internet. It allows users to send messages created on the computer to any other internet computer in a matter of seconds. Data files such as photographs, sound clips and, more usually, wordprocessed document files, can be attached to an email message. In fact any file which can be stored digitally can be transferred by email. It is usually cheaper and quicker, and more reliable, than the ordinary post. Email is becoming integrated with other communication technologies, such as faxes, pagers and mobile devices. Email messages can be accessed on smartphones and tablets.

Social media and electronic commerce have evolved with unprecedented speed and energy. As with lex mercatori, where merchants and commercial parties embraced new methods and opportunities with a cavalier attitude to the law, so do participants in the online world. The law makers have the job of reacting to and providing an appropriate response to this ever-changing landscape. In the majority of circumstances, traditional legal principles will apply. This book reflects on the jurisprudential underpinnings, and at how they absorb and assimilate changing circumstances and create new structures and new rules.

The lawyer is trained not to know all the laws but to master the ability to research current law. The lawyer must carve a path through a labyrinth of regulations, primary and secondary sources, rulings, practice notes, periodicals and databases. No single law firm or department can physically store all the materials that may be called upon, but the internet can now deliver this avalanche of material, with only two preconditions. First, the authors and handlers of the material must be willing to permit public access, and second, the lawyer must be aware of its presence.

Australian lawyers and commercial parties need to monitor the changing Australian and international legal environment to ensure that their social, legal and commercial risk is controlled and minimised. Governments and courts must remain vigilant to keep abreast of social media issues and electronic commerce developments. Regulations in cyberspace must evolve in a way that maintains the global community’s commitments to fundamental human rights and to national governance, and that reflects the range of global values and human diversity. The application of the rule of law , and of human rights law, must move into cyberspace. There are ‘profound consequences for the future of the rule of law in cyberspace’, which has developed into its own unique notion: ‘the rule of cyberspace’. This rule of cyberspace is but another step in the path of social and jurisprudential development.

The clichéd and now classic approach to introducing the digital revolution is to compare it to the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450. The Renaissance of the Middle Ages emerged from dark and secretive times, and was contributed to by an explosion of books and the release of knowledge into the wider world. A neoteric intellectual spirit was fostered. Knowledge was power – a power formerly harnessed and monopolised by a relatively small number of abbey-bound monks who hand-copied rare and invaluable tomes and held them in monastic libraries unavailable to any but those the Church permitted. Mechanisation of the production process changed this situation dramatically, and within 50 years there were 20 million books published in Europe. ‘Information wants to be free’ may be the catch-cry of the internet age but it applies to the Middle Ages as well. Mass communication through the printed word became the vehicle that drove the Renaissance, enabling and fostering an exchange of knowledge and ideas. The ‘Electronic Renaissance’ takes advantage of global communications, high speeds, bulk transfers and massive data storage capacities to power a new global knowledge revolution. Individuals in modern society have their digital persona on multiple computers: in government databases, employer databases, as memberships, via social media participation, on criminal databases for some, and as more surreptitiously collected data when we browse the internet. Much of an individual’s digital persona is available to those who know the language of computers. Commercial enterprises collate data and make serious commercial decisions on a macro and micro level.

Games have been an essential part of human societies for thousands of years, to teach skills, to earn rewards, to compete, or to escape boredom. Archaeological evidence suggests that human beings in some New World villages enjoyed dice games more than 5,000 years ago. The Royal Game of Ur, a board game still played in some parts of the world, dates back to 2600 BCE.

However, the computer, and later the Internet, transformed the essence of gaming. Now, you can play dice – and thousands of other games – with virtually anyone in the world, at any time of day or night, on a computer, smartphone, tablet, or video console. You can shoot enemy missiles, play cards, build cities, or team up with other players to bring down powerful bosses.

The term video game encompasses any kind of computer-based game, whether or not Internet access is required, and they share many characteristics. The most important feature is interactivity, which separates the video game from more passive media such as television, books, and web surfing. The player engages with the game, following its rules and recognizing its constraints. Beyond that, however, video games vary considerably, particularly from a psychological perspective.

TAXONOMY OF VIDEO GAMES

Just as it is not always clear how to categorize a book, movie, or song, it is a challenge to sort out video games into meaningful categories. Is the movie a drama or comedy? Is the song bluegrass or country? Sometimes, media wind up in odd categories for unexpected reasons. Netflix categorized Orange Is the New Black as a comedy, despite its dark themes in a women's prison, because the company didn't want the show competing for Emmy awards against its dramatic blockbuster House of Cards.

Developing close friendships, finding romance, and nurturing these relationships are lifelong pursuits that the Internet is fundamentally transforming. Not only do people seek out companions online; many rely heavily on their online tools to communicate and stay connected. We have seen how online environments can escalate tension and anger, thanks in part to features such as perceived anonymity, physical distance, and the paucity of nonverbal cues. But how do these same environments affect intimate friendships, romance, and love?

In many cases, social media and other online tools complement existing relationships that already have a strong face-to-face component. Certainly the majority of social network friends are also known to most profile owners in person, so the online relationships are just one facet of a richer context of hanging out, dates, family gatherings, meetings, or phone calls. However, people also meet for the first time through dating sites, in support groups, in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and as virtual team members at work.

Research on interpersonal attraction is voluminous, and it uncovers a great deal about the reasons one person is attracted to another, particularly on first meeting. Let's look at the factors that affect attraction in real-life settings first.

THE BASICS OF INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION, OFFLINE

When you meet another person, how do you decide that you like that person and would like to explore a more intimate relationship? What attracts you to certain people? Why would you be romantically attracted to one person, but not another? When researchers ask people what traits they look for in a potential partner, they often list characteristics such as honesty, sense of humor, intelligence, warmth, and confidence. Men tend to rate physical attractiveness in their ideal mates higher than women do, and women are more likely to consider a man's earning potential.

But both insist that looks are not the most important factor. That sounds promising, and suggests that people really try to look beyond the superficial to understand the person's character. But are those traits really what attract others?

Struggling to build a new sanctuary for sick or injured farm animals in Australia, Pam Ahern turned to the Internet for help. She launched her campaign on the online crowdfunding platform Chuffed.org, and within just three days, she reached her initial goal of $50,000. After two months, the campaign attracted support from people in fourteen countries, and donations topped $162,000. Ahern said, “I was absolutely blown away with the kindness, generosity, and belief people have shown for our work.”

RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS: INTERNET STYLE

The news rarely carries stories of how humans behave kindly, even nobly toward one another on- or offline. While stalking, cybercrime, mass protests, or pornography grab the attention of journalists, the less-sensational human interest stories might be treated more as filler for the back of the magazines. Yet behind the scenes, random acts of kindness occur regularly, and people might be surprised to learn how altruistic people can be when they enter certain online neighborhoods.

As we discussed in Chapter 4, on aggression, some online environments unleash an alarming level of toxic disinhibition, flaming, and hate speech. But we also find a considerable amount of prosocial behavior, which – in contrast to antisocial behavior – describes actions that benefit people other than oneself. Motives range from the purely altruistic to calculated self-interest, or a combination of both. But the positive contribution such behavior makes to the online world is very welcome. Three areas in which the Internet has been especially prominent are volunteerism, fundraising and crowdfunding, and online support groups.

Volunteerism

The net has a long history of volunteerism, and people freely give their time to answer random questions, maintain servers, tutor kids, edit Wikipedia entries, offer cooking tips, and write reviews. People send speedy replies to calls for help – right alongside the seedier and meaner bit streams.

People on the net are willing to help one another in small and sometimes very large ways. Helpful replies to requests for information are extremely common, and the willingness of so many to provide assistance is one of the main reasons people participate in discussion forums. For example, on Yahoo! Answers’ Homework Help topic someone asked, “What is the national costume or traditional clothes in Indonesia?” Within minutes, an answer appeared, citing “Batik and Kebaya. They are usually bright and colorful.

Caroline Criado-Perez learned firsthand how aggression unfolds online – on Twitter in her case. She was posting on social media to advocate for a female figure to appear on a Bank of England note when Internet trolls launched their attack. Two of the perpetrators used more than 80 separate accounts to bombard Criado-Perez with vile tweets that threatened rape, murder, and torture. The attacks were life changing for the victim, who couldn't sleep and doubted whether the abuse would ever end.

Rarely, offenders are caught, and the two did prison time for their actions. While savvy trolls work hard to cover their digital tracks, these offenders were not very careful. An alert investigator tracked down one down because he linked a Twitter account to a videogame profile, where he used his real name.

The man and woman who committed this aggression are two different kinds of trolls, and while their behavior was similar, the underlying causes were not. The man's lawyer described him as a sad individual with little social life, no criminal record, and learning difficulties. The woman, however, was socially active, with many offline friendships. Initially, she defended her actions with tweets like these:

But later, she seemed remorseful about her behavior:

What causes human aggression? Biological factors may play a role, particularly higher testosterone levels. But environmental factors may play a larger role. Many people believe that the Internet is loaded with trolling, fighting, and flaming and that aggression in general is higher online than offline because of the nature of the environment. Certainly, some research confirms this, especially the early studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) that uncovered startling levels of name calling, swearing, and insults – much higher than in face-to-face groups. Indeed, the woman's attorney claimed she was a “victim of new technology as she did not understand the impact of what she was doing.”

Gender has not vaporized in cyberspace, and issues related to gender roles and stereotypes have, in some ways, been exacerbated as we migrated to online environments in large numbers. I have touched on some gender issues in previous chapters as they relate to impression formation, social networking, aggression, helping, and other aspects of the psychology of the Internet. To understand why gender is relevant to our online behavior, and why this environment appears to magnify certain issues, we first need to look closely at the stereotypes people often hold about men and women, in particular, where they come from and how they affect our behavior in face-to-face settings.

MALE AND FEMALE: NOT OPPOSITE SEXES

Calling men and women “opposite” sexes has probably biased our thinking about gender roles. The truth is that there are far more similarities than differences. A major review of the huge body of research that examines gender differences came to the conclusion that when differences are found, the vast majority are quite small.

Even when statistical differences are found on some measure, the variation within each group is almost always extremely high. If, for example, a study finds that the mean score for men on a spatial abilities test comes out higher than the mean score for women, the finding is often reported with the headline, “Research confirms that men have better spatial abilities than women.” The underlying data would have shown considerable overlap, with many women outscoring men, but that is not the way it appears in the press. We like things simple, and it is just easier to slap labels on people than to struggle with the complexity underlying any kind of human behavior.

Are You Adventurous or Affectionate?

Consider, for example, a large multinational study in which researchers described two different people. One person is adventurous, coarse, dominant, forceful, independent, and strong, while the second is affectionate, dependent, dreamy, emotional, submissive, and weak. In country after country, the subjects came to the same conclusion: the first one is a man and the second one is a woman. The adjectives we tend to associate with each gender seem quite opposite, even though the reality underlying them is far more complicated.

When the first edition of The Psychology of the Internet came out in 1999, brick and mortar bookstores still reigned. With eight employees, Google had just outgrown its garage office, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg immersed himself in classics as a high school sophomore. The release of Apple's iPhone and the torrent of mobile applications that followed were nearly a decade away. I would say “much has happened since 1999” if it were not such a laughable understatement.

The Internet of the 1990s attracted pioneers who explored an unchartered territory that took fortitude even to enter. Clunky dial-up modems, buggy software, frustrating load times, and unreliable connections dogged our efforts and blocked our work. At that time, the psychological aspects of the different corners of cyberspace received little attention from researchers, but anyone who spent time online could see that those aspects were already having fundamental effects on human behavior. To better understand how and why we were behaving in sometimes surprising ways, I drew mainly on classic research in the social sciences.

Those classic studies remain relevant, but this new edition adds a wealth of contemporary research that examines the psychology of the vastly expanded online world. Active research in psychology, communications, computer science, business, political science, and other disciplines is generating new insights about human behavior online, especially on social media. Many academic journals specifically focus on these topics, such as Computers in Human Behavior; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking; New Media and Society; CyberPsychology and Behavior; and Cyberpsychology. Universities are launching academic programs, conferences, and institutes on Internet studies to explore the broader issues that the net raises for human beings, bringing together people with different backgrounds and perspectives.

As in the first edition, my goal is not to extol a utopian future built on emerging digital technologies. Nor is it to paint a darker picture in which the Internet leads to dire consequences for human behavior and social relationships. Instead, I describe – in a balanced way – what we actually know from research about the psychology of the Internet, citing both positives and negatives and raising many new questions. Some of the research zeroes in on specifics the reader should find quite useful, such as how people form impressions from social media profiles, or why certain videos go viral.

Scrolling through Twitter's trending topics, I came upon #Ilostsleepbecause, one of those “fill in the blank” Internet memes that spreads from person to person, nudging Twitter users around the world to add witty or eye-catching endings. One response was, “There are still people out there who haven't watched Casablanca.” Another person tweeted, “I don't know how to put my phone down,” and that answer resonates with many of us. The smartphone connects the Twitter user to the Internet 24 hours a day, and it never sleeps, either.

At one time, the Internet was an arcane communication medium for academics and researchers, but now it sustains almost any human activity you can imagine, from shopping to sex, from research to rebellion. We use it to keep in touch with friends and coworkers, search for bargains, conduct research, exchange information, meet strangers, hatch conspiracies, and even talk to animals. Koko, the mountain gorilla who knows some American Sign Language, participated in a live Internet chat. People from all over the world logged into the chat room to ask questions and hear Koko's views on motherhood, pets, food preferences, friendship, love, and the future. She was not in the best mood, having just had a tiff with her mate, Ndume, and she shared her annoyance with the crowd by referring to him derisively as toilet, which is her word for “bad.”

The Internet explosion happened very rapidly, and online environments continue to change at a breathtaking pace. For researchers trying to study how the net affects human behavior, it is a constantly moving target, but we know that the Internet is a place where we humans are acting and interacting rather strangely at times. Sometimes its psychological effects seem to be quite positive, but sometimes, we do things online that we might never do in any other environment and that we regret later. At the same time, it is an environment that we can affect and mold – for better or worse.

If you mainly read news online, but occasionally glance at the comments, you might think that the Internet at large is overpopulated by people with mental disorders, bizarre ideas, and questionable motives and that normal folk had better tread very cautiously.

When was the last time you read the end-user license agreement (EULA) before installing an app on your smartphone? These EULAs stretch to thousands of words of legalese, and many of them require you to relinquish a considerable amount of privacy before you can use the app. Embedded in all that tiny print are terms that might allow the company to collect data on usage patterns, your location and movements, your purchases, your messaging habits, and more.

How do people think about online privacy, and what strategies are they using to protect it? Perhaps many of us have just given up and are taking the advice of Scott McNealy, the co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems. Back in 1999, long before Facebook's breaches, Edward Snowden's revelations, and the hacked records at the Office of Personnel Management. McNealy said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Intellectually, we may suspect that privacy in cyberspace is an endangered species, but we often don't act like it. People rant about their bosses online in ways they would never do at the office. They attach compromising photos to their text messages, but certainly won't slip the same photo into a 9 × 12 envelope and drop it in the mail. We profess to value privacy, but we still click “install” without reading the fine print.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which online privacy and surveillance are evolving, how people are reacting to the changes, and what psychological effects the overall erosion of privacy is having. To start, however, let's look at what the term actually means and how our understanding of privacy continually changes.

THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF “PRIVACY”

Although much writing on the concept of “privacy” is relatively recent, anthropologists contend that the drive to keep certain things private dates back millions of years. For a hunting and gathering group, individuals might want to withdraw from interactions at times or conceal some of their actions from other group members. But as human beings settled into larger agricultural communities, they no longer knew all the members quite as well, and they had fewer opportunities to form strong, trusting bonds with all those people. That may also foster a greater interest in privacy along with social norms that define what constitutes intrusions.

Technology writer Paul Miller decided to “unplug” in 2012, burnt out by what he called the hamster wheel of email and the deluge of information on the web. He kept his job at The Verge, partly because his boss approved of the plan and thought it would make a great story. Miller continued to submit articles, but he stopped using email, the web, social media, and everything else on the net.

Miller is not the only one alarmed by how central the Internet had become in his life and how much time he spent online. Many of you reading this chapter can relate to his angst, a sinking feeling that we may have gone overboard with our gadgets and constant connectedness. A friend asked me, “Do you check your smartphone as soon as you wake up?” Then she added, “My problem is that I wake up to check it and can't get back to sleep.”

Researchers interested in how much people use the Internet often ask questions such as, “How many hours a week do you spend online?” But with net access available on smartphones, watches, and Google Glass headgear, we are increasingly always online, so questions like that seem quaintly antiquated. Advantages abound, of course, from catching up on work during a long commute on a train equipped with wifi to an instant notification about a flash flood on a road you were about to cross. But problems are also arising as the Internet's time sink encroaches on more and more of our lives. Let's start with what is called work–life balance, which may need a new name because it is now less “balance” and more “merger.”

THE 24/7 WORK WEEK

Do your colleagues expect you to read email in the evenings and on weekends? Does your boss expect that? Do you expect that of yourself, and of your own coworkers? Many do, especially if they are in industries such as real estate, sales, journalism, consulting, finance, or safety. And even if your employer doesn't write down any particular policies, you may feel as if you need to stay in close touch – to earn that promotion, for instance, or to escape the next layoff.

On a typical evening, twelve-year-old Jason splits his time between texting friends, completing math homework, commenting on YouTube videos, playing video games, and listening to music. He eats dinner with his parents and sister, a rule the parents insist on. But during dinner his eyes frequently gaze down to check his smartphone and he replies to texts.

If you were born in the 1980s or early 1990s, you are most likely a member of the first generation of digital natives. Some of you might have played Reader Rabbit on your home computer and learned to type long before you reached high school, when typing classes were offered. After the first web browser burst on the scene in 1993, you found wonderful new ways to use the net to communicate with friends, show off your personality, search for information, amuse yourself, and do your homework.

When you reached college, your professors wondered if you really were a different breed of human. They are digital immigrants, who adopted some of these technologies as adults. But you grew up with early versions of these technologies. Your younger siblings – the second generation of digital natives born in the mid-1990s or later – are far more connected and comfortable than even you are. In a short YouTube video, a one-year-old daughter confidently swipes an iPad touchscreen. But in the next scene, she tries to use the same finger motions on page after page of a printed magazine – apparently coming to the conclusion that the print version is a broken iPad.

Lamenting the various failings of each new generation is certainly nothing new for older generations, but this time, the context of child development and parenting is different. For example, some parents deeply regret buying a smartphone for their child, but the psychological attachment is so strong that they can't take it away. They try making rules, but it seems a constant tug of war that undermines relationships.

How do people manage their self-presentations online? How successful are we at conveying the impression we hope to create? And what cues do we use to form impressions of other people when we read their emails or browse their social network profiles?

For face-to-face settings, there is no shortage of advice. Consultants eager to help us create the right impression abound, whether the goal is to impress a prospective boss, get elected to public office, make a sale over the telephone, or get a date. For a face-to-face job interview, they offer tips such as “show confidence with a strong handshake” or “maintain eye contact to show interest.” Researchers have spent considerable effort exploring how people present themselves in person and how those strategies affect the impressions they make on different audiences.

Online, different approaches work, and an especially clever self-presentation might lead to instant celebrity status. Dave Carroll, a little known Canadian musician, posted a music video called “United Breaks Guitars.” The catchy folk song explains how clumsy airport baggage handlers broke Carroll's expensive guitar and how his attempts to negotiate compensation met with failure. The video attracted 150,000 viewers in just one day, and many millions within a month. Carroll's lighthearted approach led to quasi-celebrity status and many invitations to speak on customer service at corporate events, as well as a new book. United eventually asked for permission to use the video in its own training programs.

Embarrassing blunders are easy to make and difficult to retract. A university administrator sent out an email to 40,000 students, encouraging them to opt in to paperless delivery of 1098-T tuition forms. The students quickly discovered they could reply to all, and what became known as “replyallcalypse” ensued. A suddenly empowered student body shared jokes, friendly comments, cries for help, and complaints, along with many calls to stop “replying to all” as their inboxes flooded. The employee who made the mistake apologized but the floodgate was already wide open.