The chief aim of this book is to provide an account of the apparent explosion in disturbing social trends and extreme forms of moral wrong-doing that have emerged on-line in recent years. There is a large and exponentially growing body of work on various positive aspects of the technology, such as the growth of knowledge, the freedom of speech and the revitalization of democracy the Internet has been thought to facilitate.[1] The focus of this book however, concerns far more morally problematic aspects of our relatively new computer-mediated-communication contexts, which, as yet, have not been the subject of comprehensive analysis at all.
The on-line communication environment is characterized by a complex of features that together, along with consideration of its location within and impact upon off-line social institutions and forms, seem relevant to the development and expression of moral values attached to our identities and relationships with others. Such features, for instance, as the atypically high degrees of choice and control which afford how one presents oneself to others, relative anonymity and isolation from a variety of checks and balances, such as the “normalizing” influence and constraints of others and the realities of the world around one. These features, or more specific aspects of them, have already been identified by various descriptive studies as characteristic of online communication, and in some cases connections are claimed to certain positive effects for individual psychologies and worthwhile relations between people.[2]
Our research suggests however, that such features also help explain the success and the propagation of various disturbing social trends, practices, and extreme forms of moral wrong-doing to have emerged online. Some of the key phenomena we have in mind here include: the explosion of e-corruption, such as identity fraud; depictions of extreme violence, such as in ultra-violent video games or real life atrocities, such as acts of terrorism; sex crime and perversion, including, for instance, “virtual” material, such as produced by state-of-the-art computer graphic imaging techniques, and the emergence of abhorrent communities, such as “Rape” clubs where members get to swap stories of, and boast about, actual rapes, and; harmful pseudo-science and “support” or “interest” groups, such as the shocking “Attachment Therapy” for difficult children promoted by the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children, and which resulted in the killing of a10-year-old girl.[3] Evil Online, therefore, covers some of the most recent episodes in the history of extreme moral wrong-doing, and in doing so, aims to make a significant theoretical contribution to the understanding of the moral phenomenology and moral psychology of the on-line world.
[1] A short Google search session will provide ample evidence for this claim: www.e-democracy.org
provides a good starting point, as do the links listed on the site of the Hansard Society, www.hansardsociety.org, or links, e.g., http://www.publicus.net/articles/edemresources.html.
[2] See McKenna and Seidman, “Social Identity and the Self: Getting Connected Online”, in Walker and Hermann (eds) Cognitive Technology: Essays on the Transformation of Thought and Society (McFarlane and Company Inc. U.S., 2005).
[3] The 10-year-old Candace Newmaker was killed by therapists in a violent physical mangling procedure, which was supposed to break here resistance and establish a new attachment. The group advertises its ideas on www.ATTACh.org. See for a report and analysis “Death by Theory” by Michael Shermer, Scientific American, June 2004, p.23.
