Policing the Virtual Community: The Internet, Cyberspace and Cyber-Crime
David S. Wall · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 1997
The 1980s and 1990s has witnessed the development of an exciting new domain which, warts and all, is potentially free of conventional politics, social order and social regulation. Never before has there been so much ready access to such a broad range of human knowledge and experience. However this ‘cyberspace’, which has been created by the Internet, 2 is not without its contradictions. The optimism arising from its potential to democratize access to hitherto restricted knowledge and thus level out some of the social boundaries that have developed both within and across societies is tempered by the nature of this revolutionary new resource. In addition to the considerable benefits that the Internet creates, there are also many opportunities for new types of offending and new forms of anti-social behaviour. Moreover, cyberspace undermines economic, social and political boundaries, posing a considerable threat to traditional forms of governance and creating a challenge to traditional understandings of order. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.