One of the things I found fascinating about Kaye’s article — and indeed cyberpsychology as a whole — is what it tells us about how a new field of research (or theory or application) emerges in psychology or any other science. Early cyberpsychology research has involved a blend of testing existing principles in a novel environment and developing new lines of research and theory where a need for new ideas has emerged.
Of course, there have been some blind alleys along the way. One of the apparently promising lines of enquiry when the internet developed in the 1990s concerned the characteristics of ‘digital citizens’, the minority of people who interacted with the internet. Now that the majority of the global population use the internet the whole idea of digital citizens is redundant.
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