Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet

A useful inventory of types of social and criminal online misbehavior, understood within a media ecology framework. Flamers, spammers, pranksters, virtual rapists, hackers–Sternberg captures the running battles between the Athenians and Visigoths of virtual communities, and shows us how netizens can control and police their cyber places. She examines digital skirmishes filtered through media ecology’s understandings of environment, space, place, and situation, allowing her broad generalizations about the Internet as medium as well as concrete assessments of particular online misbehavior occurring in concrete contexts. The prerogatives and limitations of the Internet’s rule-makers, rule-enforcers, and community pressures are illustrated with clear examples and envisioned with sensitive, pragmatic, ethical guidelines. Her award-winning research on and visions of cyber relationships is now available to all netizens. Bravo!

Everyone who has ever used the Internet has experienced online misbehavior first hand. So why haven’t scholars written more about it? Janet Sternberg’s book Misbehavior in Cyber Places is one of the few comprehensive treatments of the issue.

The next real generation of media theorists in the spirit of McLuhan, Ong, and Innis has finally arrived as Janet Sternberg. She revisits media ecology in the social and behavioral landscape of the net, upscaling the study of media onto an altogether new playing field: human misbehavior. From cheaters to spoilsports to shamans, this is not your mother’s media analysis.

This study represents an important contribution to the research on computer communication. Sternberg makes it clear that we cannot fully comprehend behavior online unless we first examine misbehavior, that rules and roles are most visible when they are violated. The media ecology approach that Sternberg employs, especially when incorporating symbolic interactional, relational, and situational perspectives, is essential to a comprehensive understanding of our new electronic environments.

To be programmed or to program? That is the question. For media ecology scholars, it is time to examine digital media from a new perspective. Janet Sternberg gives her answer to the above question in the book Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet. In comparison with monographs on digital media or human behavior, the book is intriguing because it revisits media ecology both from social and human behavioral perspectives and acts as an important call for scholarship on studies involving situationist-based medium theory.