Preface

The psychology of cyberspace, or cyberpsychology, is a new field of study. Fewer than a handful of universities around the world offer a course in this emerging area, despite the unequivocal fact that many activities today take place online. In this novel social environment, new psychological circumstances project onto new rules governing human experiences, including physiological responses, behaviors, cognitive processes, and emotions. It seems, however, that psychology gradually is acknowledging and accepting this new field of study, as more behavioral scholars have begun to research the field, growing numbers of articles in the area appear in psychology journals, and an increasing number of books related to this domain are being published. This change reflects not only the growing number of professionals who find interest in researching the new field but also the growing number of people – students and laypeople alike – who search for credible and professional answers in this relatively unknown and uninvestigated area of human psychology. I discovered this exciting direction in psychology mainly because of personal necessity. I was living in London, Ontario, Canada – affiliated with The University of Western Ontario and collaborating with my long-time friend and colleague William (Bill) Fisher, with whom I have thoroughly studied issues of sexuality on the Internet – when the revolutionary computer network, called the Internet, emerged (quite innovative in comparison to the relatively primitive Bitnet we used before).