The Cyber Worlds of Self‐Injurers: Deviant Communities, Relationships, and Selves

Abstract

We explore how self-injurers, a group of deviants who primarily were loners, now use the Internet to form subcultural and collegial relations. Drawing on virtual participant-observation in cyber self-injury groups, over eighty face-to-face and telephone in-depth interviews, and over ten thousand e-mail postings to groups and bulletin boards, we describe and analyze the online subcultures of self-injurers. Via the Web, they have become cyber "colleagues, " simultaneously enacting two deviant organizational forms and challenging the idea that deviant loners can exist in a cyber society. We further analyze these individuals and their interactions to compare and contrast the venues that they use, the communities and relationships that they form, and their relation to real life. We contribute to symbolic interactionism through our social constructionist stance toward the creation of virtual communities and relationships, our focus on identity and stigma, our view of social organization as grounded in the panoply of human interpersonal relationships, our contrast of the competing reality claims posed by virtual as opposed to the solid world, and our discussion of the modern versus postmodern self.The cyber world represents a new frontier, one that extends what has often been colloquially referred to as the fourth and fifth dimensions: time and space. Just as Melbin (1978) analyzed the night as a temporal frontier, the cyber world is a domain that occurs in a new form of space both "out there" and "in here"; it is simultaneously public and social, while remaining private and solitary. It is a postmodern form of space, created by technology and populated by disembodied people in a virtual universe detached from the physical locations known as place. These spaces are

Measuring the extent and nature of use of Social Networking Sites in Medical Education (SNSME) by university students: Results of a multi-center study

“…The use of SNSs is not without problems; Internet addiction, cybercrimes and harassments, and less productivity are so of those [31]. A growing body of literature has argued that university students engage in several activities in SNSs to enrich and supplement their academic activities [32–34].…”

The Web of Loneliness: A Netnographic Study of Narratives of Being Alone in an Online Context

“…This has been discussed by Adler and Adler (2005), who focus on the cyber-worlds of self-injurers. In their study, they show how people who lack social relations with similar others (called "loners"), although isolated and lonely while away from their keyboard, have constructed a myriad of online groups through which they can connect with others who, like themselves, feel as if they are on the margins of society (Adler and Adler 2011;Smith and Stewart 2012;Saba and McCormick 2001). The possibilities to establish or upkeep social relations, and avoid feelings of isolation and loneliness through social media, has also been discussed in studies on, for example, migrant workers who for long periods live geographically isolated from family and friends (Kilkey et al 2014).…”

Cultures of the Internet: Identity, community and mental health

“…For example, the emergence of online communities of selfidentified ''pro-anorexics'' (''pro-anas''), ''pro-bulimics'' (''pro-mias'') and persons engaged in self-injury has been greeted with alarm by many mental health professionals, as well as the lay public-because they are often understood as potentially promoting, amplifying, or triggering harmful behaviors in vulnerable individuals with a history of self-injury or eating disorders (Adler & Adler, 2008; S. P. Lewis, Heath, St Denis, & Noble, 2011;Miah & Rich, 2008;Norris, Boydell, Pinhas, & Katzman, 2006). Scholarly and clinical debates surrounding these communities hinge on the question of whether they actively promote harmful behavior-in part by framing eating disorders or self-injury as identities and legitimate ways of being rather than pathology-or whether they provide a safe, nonjudgmental (and potentially therapeutic) space for the discussion of one's problems (Bell, 2007;Brotsky & Giles, 2007;Dias, 2003).…”