The Cyber Effect

by Mary Aiken

  But many people deny the awareness that they’ve entered a new environment when they go online, so they remain ignorant—and are fooled by their sense that nothing has changed. They are sitting in their own homes, surrounded by familiar objects, after all, and their bodies are resting in the cushions of familiar chairs and sofas. In their minds, they have not “gone” anywhere. But the conditions and qualities of the online environment are different from real life. That is why our instincts, which were honed for the real world, fail us in cyberspace.

  Naiveté and bad judgment about this environment can be evidenced every day—when we pick up a newspaper and see that a politician has distributed photographs of his genitals to horrified strangers, when a celebrity rants crazily on Twitter, or when another sex tape goes viral. Traditional authorities and support systems appear to be absent online—or they are just as confused as you are. As devices and gadgets change, and technology changes, the cyber environment changes with it, which impacts human behavior again. This causes upheaval to individuals, industry, finance, government, all of society. The more changes there are, the more new situations arise, creating only more confusion.

  Psychologists know that living in a state of societal change is easier for some than others. But for most, trying to keep pace with recent technological changes has been dizzying. While many people are still finding their footing in this new environment, with all its new neighborhoods and new behaviors, there are many more changes yet to come. This can only result in more new situations and more confusion.

  One sure way of coping with a state of constant flux is to become more knowledgeable about how the cyber environment affects all of us—how people, yourself included, may act there. Knowledge is power, and it’s tremendously reassuring. A familiarity with the basics of cyberpsychology will help you answer the questions I hear all day, and would hear all night if I were to never sleep and just read my email.

  Questions like:

  • At what age can my baby start watching digital screens?

  • Is it okay for a toddler to play with an iPad?

  • Is there a connection between online gaming and ADHD in young boys?

  • Should I allow teenagers to spend hours in the bathroom with their smartphones?

  • Does technology contribute to social isolation?

  • Can real relationships be formed in cyberspace?

  • Why do people troll online?

  • Should I be afraid of “the Deep Web”?

  Cyber is not just a transactional medium, for things like passively viewing television or making a phone call. It is a highly interactive, highly engaging, and highly immersive environment—uniquely compelling and attractive to humans. Perhaps too compelling. What about your toddler who throws a tantrum when you ask for your tablet back, or your teenager who screams when Wi-Fi slows down, or your aunt and uncle who seem to be in a constant state of tech rage (“The computer’s broken!”), or the fact that your grandmother on Facebook has made lots of new online “pen pals” in Nigeria?

  Cyberspace is full of place names—social networks, forums, sites—and once there, we join up with a far larger group than we’ve been with before, which also makes this environment distinct. There are now billions of people online. This has prompted a lot of new situations and confusion. With such a wide array of new friends and contacts in your life, it’s crucial to know more about human behavior—and understand how it changes online. Our instincts have evolved to handle face-to-face interactions, but once we go into cyberspace, these instincts fail us. We are impaired, as if we had been given keys to a car but not learned how to drive. We need more tools and more knowledge. Because if you spend time online, you are likely to encounter a far greater variety of human behavior than you have before—from the vulnerable to the criminal, from the gleeful and altruistic to the dark and murderous.

  My focus on cyber-forensics in my work with law enforcement means that I witness both the best and the worst aspects of human behavior manifested online. I like to say that technology was designed to be rewarding, engaging, and seductive for so-called normal populations. But did anyone really think about how it would impact abnormal, deviant, criminal, and vulnerable populations?

  Considering those risks is part of my work too.

  How to Read This Book

  We all know about the incredible benefits of the Internet. I could talk all day about them—the convenience, connectedness, affordability, creativity, altruism, educational and commercial opportunities, entrepreneurship, and cultural exchange. I’m pretty sure you are aware of these things too. An army of marketing experts working for all the biggest tech companies and conglomerates do nothing but dream up new and better irresistible products and new and better ways to sell them to us. They are supergood at convincing us of the necessary features of these gadgets and software and apps and touchscreens.

  My job isn’t to criticize technology. Good science focuses on balance. If I seem to focus on many of the negative aspects of technology, it is in order to bring the debate back to the balanced center rather than have one driven by utopian idealism or commercialism. My job is just to provide the best wisdom possible, based on what we know about human beings and how their cognitive, behavioral, physiological, social, developmental, affective, and motivational capabilities have been exploited or compromised or changed by the design of these products.

  Technology is not good or bad in its own right. It is neutral and simply mediates behavior—which means it can be used well or poorly by humankind. This understanding is fundamental to my work. This is no different from how we regard automobiles and drunk driving. Any technology can be misused.

  One of my earliest influences was J.C.R. Licklider, an American psychologist and computer scientist who in 1960 wrote a seminal paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which predated the Internet but foretold the potential for a symbiotic relationship between man and machine; in fact, you could say he was the first cyberpsychologist. I read “Lick” with amazement at his ability to gaze into the future with such clarity and wisdom. Early on I was also drawn to the work of Patricia Wallace, who wrote The Psychology of the Internet, an influential academic book and popular success in 1999. Soon afterward, I became aware of John Suler, a clinical psychologist and pioneer, the acknowledged “father of cyberpsychology,” who has been working in this area since the nineties and wrote The Psychology of Cyberspace, first published as a digital book in 1996. John has really captured the essence of cyber in his work and has explored the potential benefits and hazards of cyberspace and characterized the way people tend to behave in the online environment.

  —

  Just as I was embarking on my own study and research, I reached out in cyberspace to John. This led to an exchange of emails, which led to an eventual face-to-face meeting at Rider University, in New Jersey, his academic home. They say it’s hard to meet your idols. But in my case, I just wish I’d worn the right shoes.

  It was a grueling hot day, and John had just come from a lecture when I arrived on campus. He wanted to stretch his legs a bit. “Let’s walk while we talk,” he said. Then, with the air of a Socratic philosopher striding across the Acropolis, he set off at warp speed across the quad. John is a tall man, and each stride meant about four hurried steps for me. To prepare for our meeting, I had carefully considered various cyberpsychological constructs that I thought we might discuss, but I didn’t think it would happen outdoors in blistering heat, or while I was wearing heels that were unsuitable for uneven terrain, much less a forced-march pace that would make a marine weep. In many ways, all the rest of us are still trying to keep up with John.

  Over the past decade, he has become my great friend and colleague. Some of his groundbreaking constructs and observations inform a number of the concepts addressed in this book. In recent years, I have had the pleasure of meeting a growing group of like-minded researchers worldwide, who share ideas with me and collaborate on studies. I am thrilled to showcase an impressive body
of work in the chapters to come. Approximately thirty peer-reviewed journals now publish an estimated one thousand articles every year on topics related to cyberbehavior, a field that is expected to enjoy exponential growth in the next decades due to the pervasive and profound impact of technology on humans.

  Like other fields of scientific endeavor, mine is a land of jargon and caution. The behavioral sciences have been blindsided by developments in technology to a certain extent. In the late 1990s colleagues of mine referred to the Internet as a passing phenomenon. In the mid-2000s they said that people would never use online social media platforms to communicate. Now fifteen years and billions of people later…a game of catch-up is going on.

  Academics are great at finding complicated ways to not really say what we mean. Our academic papers are littered with hedging adverbs like arguably, plausibly, and questionably. We seem to enjoy adding an -ably to as many words as possible, hoping to render our sentences harmless. Some researchers employ what I call “sleight of word” as a career-protection mechanism, just in case, at some point in time, an idea might be proven wrong. But I don’t believe scientific breakthroughs are achieved by metaphorically sitting on the fence. On the cyber frontier, we need scientists who are prepared to nail their colors to the mast and back their own informed instincts. Of course we need evidence-based studies over time, but how long can we wait?

  Babies are being born, kids are growing up, and lives are being changed. Society is being reshaped. We need to talk about this now.

  In hopes of reaching a wider audience, I have tried to make this book as practical and straightforward as I know how. I have tried to make the science comprehensible and spare you too many stats and studies. For those who share this affinity or are interested in a deeper dive, there are extensive chapter notes to draw on in the back of the book. They are written with a broad audience in mind as well.

  To keep up with changing technology, and changing human behavior, my work requires creativity, flexibility, and an ability to juggle a lot of theoretical constructs. It’s probably a good thing, then, that I haven’t got the sort of brain that thinks in a linear way. I feel more like a depository of organized chaos, but this helps me identify patterns quickly and make intuitive leaps. My approach is transdisciplinary by necessity—drawing on psychology, sociology, anthropology, computer science, criminology, and network science. It can cross other academic boundaries too. I find that the different disciplines help to illuminate problems that are arising, and help to illuminate solutions too.

  In the absence of longitudinal studies, I employ logic—a mixture of common sense and reasoning—then construct plausible arguments based on a body of knowledge and current observable phenomena and reports, which I hope will start some meaningful debates about human behavior online, something I feel is much needed. I have also drawn on those very special and uniquely human skills: insight and intuition. As the great robotic scientist Masahiro Mori said, “Do not ignore the small things.” In science we should not be afraid to listen to ourselves or to pay attention to the little things. Mori himself was not reluctant to share his thoughts and suspicions—about humans and machines, about artificial intelligence, and about the need to take pleasure, even delight, in our intuitions. His approach inspires me. Academics need to reconsider how we handle behavioral problems that are evolving at the speed of technology. We need academic first responders.

  Quite often, I have leaned on the investigative journalism of publications such as Wired, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other reliable sources and legacy media to read emerging frontline reports of anecdotal evidence, see patterns of behavior, and try to make sense of them. In a field as rapidly evolving as the Internet, and the technology using it, we need good journalism more than ever.

  In the nine chapters to follow, I have arranged material into areas of special concern—as well as my own focus. The impact of technology on human behavior begins at birth and ends at death, so I have chapters that deal with all age groups—from babies, toddlers, kids, and teens to adults. In chapters about addiction and compulsive behavior, I’ve looked at ways that some types of problematic behavior can be enormously impacted by the online environment. And in a chapter about the phenomenon of cyberchondria, I’ve argued that the prevalence of the online medical search has resulted in a rise in unnecessary doctor visits and risky surgical procedures.

  The frightening revelations in this book, and the chapter on the Deep Web, are not included simply for kicks and thrills. The dark hidden corners of the Internet where criminals syndicate and a black market is thriving are things every single person online should know about. Why? Because more and more young people are being enticed to go there, driven by a combination of adolescent risk-taking and curiosity. Somehow they’ve gotten the wrong impression that it’s perfectly safe in the Deep Web, even fun. But it isn’t.

  My own particular concern is the impact of technology on the developing child. The Internet has opened the world up to our children, yet it gives the world access to them too. I don’t think most people know enough about this. There is a great paper in the journal Pediatrics on the impact of technology on the developing child entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown.” It’s that last part, the unknown, that really bothers me. As the clinical psychologist Michael Seto has said, “We are living through the largest unregulated social experiment of all time—a generation of youth who have been exposed to extreme content online.”

  What will happen to this generation over time? What is the impact in terms of exposure to the harsher and bleaker aspects of the Internet?

  CSI: Cyber

  The raid on the house in South Central L.A. was as terrifying as you might imagine, and I have to confess that as our convoy pulled up outside the target house, I turned to Lt. Grossman to ask if I could stay in the armored police car rather than move forward with the unit.

  “No, Mary, it’s not safe,” she replied.

  The armored car wasn’t safe? Wow. I thought, What am I getting into? The next twenty minutes went by in a blur. There was a lot of shouting, banging doors, barking orders with guns drawn, handcuffings, and arrests. As an observer, it was both frightening and fascinating. I stood in the background, next to a wall of the living room where the suspect was apprehended, and I found myself tapping the wall, hoping it was solid concrete and would protect me from stray bullets. No bullets were fired, I am happy to report. The raid was a complete success, the kind of slick professional operation that this LAPD unit carries out several times a week. The main suspect was taken immediately to a mobile on-site LAPD computer forensics field truck, known as “the beast,” where he confessed.

  Once it was all over, the police team relaxed and tucked into a hearty feast of breakfast burritos while I sat quietly, sipping bottled water in a state of relief and shock, still swaddled in my protective gear. I have been asked to go out with Lt. Grossman and her team a few times since, but I assured them that my real-world frontline policing experience is truly complete. I have the utmost respect for the work carried out by first responders in law enforcement—day in, day out—but participating as an observer in an exercise like this served to reinforce this respect. And the truth is, I don’t think that I am cut out for frontline active service in the real world—but I am happy to serve on the cyber frontier.

  Besides, my real job is challenging enough—finding risks in places where we feel perfectly safe. Each year has brought more studies in my field and more discoveries. While conducting my research, I have had a chance to meet and speak with leaders in law enforcement and policy makers in government around the world, and have engaged as an academic with Europol, INTERPOL, the FBI, and the White House. In 2012, supported by a great mentor and colleague, Professor Ciaran O’Boyle, I founded the CyberPsychology Research Centre in Dublin, now an international network designed to support and nurture cutting-edge research projects, and most recently found myself spending a good bit of time in Hollywood, working on the televi
sion show CSI: Cyber, inspired by my work. In the show, Patricia Arquette plays Avery Ryan, a special agent in the FBI Cyber Crime unit who is tasked with solving high-octane crimes that “start in the mind, live online, and play out into the real world.” That describes my work perfectly.

  Factoring the Human

  Earlier in this prologue I asserted my view that the Internet is distinct from the so-called real world, but that I don’t mean to suggest that what happens there isn’t real. And in terms of human behavior, what happens online is a little like one of those evolving flu viruses or Ebola. Once behavior mutates in cyberspace, where a significant number of people participate, it can double back around and become a norm in everyday life, something I call cyber-migration. This means that the implications of the online experience and environment are ever evolving and profound, and impact us all—no matter where we live or spend time.

  When I studied psychology as an undergraduate, we used to say that the problem with the field was that for too long it had “lived on a diet of white mice and college student surveys.” Something similar can be said of technology: For too long it has lived on a diet of data, devices, and tech experts. Now it’s time to turn our focus to the greater socio-technological implications. How have these advancements changed human behavior and society? It is time to consider that awkward entity, Homo sapiens, whose thumbs are too big for cellphone keypads, whose bodies are too clumsily shaped for wearable technology design, and whose memory is too weak to retain multiple ten-digit passwords. In other words, it’s time to factor in the human. Sometimes our excitement about technology has prevented us from seeing the bigger picture.