Psychology and the Internet: A Social Ecological Analysis

Of Mice and Mentors

“…What Engelbart and his colleagues set out to do in 1962 was alter the social cognitive environment, or social ecology,1,2 in which an “augmented”3 science would take place. Unabashedly, the group had been influenced by the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf,4 who suggested that language as a human invention could influence the sophistication of thought: The better and more complete the system for symbolic representation, the better and more sophisticated the intellect it enabled 4,5.…”

Self-presentation in the online dating environment.

“…Introduction From its humble beginnings in 1965, when a telephone line was used to wire a computer on the East coast of the United States to a computer on the West coast, the Internet has progressed to a technological source of vast amounts of information and a unique social domain that facilitates interpersonal communication (Montero & Stokols, 2003) and relationship formation and development (e.g., Baker, 2000;Parks & Roberts, 1998). Much of the research on online relationships has focussed on groups that are formed and tend to stay exclusively online in such contexts as newsgroups, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and the fantasy environments of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons or Dimensions), MOOs (ObjectOriented MUDs), and MUSHES (Mult-User Shared Hallucinations) (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimmons, 2002;Biggs, 2000;Parks & Floyd, 1996;Parks & Roberts, 1998;Suler, 2000).…”