Towards Cyberpsychology

Book excerpt: Drawing on research in the social sciences, communications, and other fields, this book wants to analyze how the online environment is influencing the experience of psychology. However, understanding how the Internet is changing our everyday experience presents a substantial challenge for the psychologists. Now, research in this area is still sparse and limited in both the number and scope of studies: actual research, especially studies with strict methodologies, is only just beginning. The contributions in this book are among the first scientific attempts to take a serious look at various aspects of Internet-related psychology. However, we need not start from scratch. Psychology has a broad knowledge about the factors that affect human behaviour in other setting. So, the papers collected for this book are descriptive and practical-oriented in nature.