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Welcome to CyberPsychology, the study of online behaviour
in this new environment
we can be whoever we want to be
But who are you?
At the moment it is two topics that I'm interested in. The first one is,
leadership in an online context. And what this really means is
is when we look about, we have years of
study of leadership. But now in this new online context
does it actually translates? If you are a leader in the face to face
context
can you actually transfer that into the online. What we find is that it is
not really the same way. Even if you look around this room
it is pretty clear in this room where the leadership is. It is the person
at the back who is watching everyone. And everyone down here acts like that is the case.
But in an online context, there is no observer,
there's no individually space, there is no rows,
It is like that.
So, what you do find is that leadership transfers and works in a different way.
You have some people who lead in an online context easily.
But they will not be able to do it in an offline context.
So, we have a minimisation of authority and we have different
I suppose status symbols and means in which people
convince and persuade. What I'm also interested is
again something that is invoked by this room
is the phenomenon of cyber-bullying.
The problem with some reporting is that when you try to compare
traditional bullying in the school context with
what happens in the online contest, it doesn't really work. For the most parts
children who are cyber-bullied may not know, they are cyber-bullied
who is attacking them, because it can be anonymous.
Again on the other side the bully
needn't necessarily have the same attributes
online as they do offline because you know in a playground environment.
It is usually the biggest kids who are the bullies. But in an online context
anybody can do it. In this online contexts
what is really important for people to
realise is what you might call to have situation awareness.
So, one thing that people are really struggling to conceptualise
is that when you're online that you're talking to
way more people than you actually have
any conceptualisation of. But you're not really aware of it.
So, you post something on Facebook and nobody likes it,
nobody replies. You think that nobody have seen it but an actual fact
what's more likely is in the region of 10 to 100 people at least
have seen it. That's usually a good multiplayer, if five people like it, you can
probably estimate that at least 50, if not 500 people have seen it.
And that is something which has another knock-on effect,
is that it means that when you're online
and you're not aware, you're not publicly self-aware aware of
how many people are watching you, you tend to reveal more
information about yourself. You tend to self disclose.
People tend to give away personal information which they
wouldn't do face-to-face
So, how do we as CyberPsychologists
how can we help you today watching this.
The first thing that I would suggest that everybody
try and learn how to protect their own identity online.
There is a couple easy things you can do learn about this.
First thing is in any of your
online profiles, log out immediately
and then go and look at your public profile and have a good
long look at it. The first thing you can you point is that you probably
start to
maybe be a little bit embarrassed about things you said publicly.
You might find that you're revelling a little too much
personal information and these are settings which you can change
It's also useful to
bear in mind that these social networking sites
they are constantly changing because of demand of information
we are all putting into them, we're actually building these networks.
But they are also constantly changing
from the point of view of the architectures. Facebook changes its design
roughly every six months maybe three months. It is to keep you interested.
So you never get used to it. So, it can often
be useful to take a break from yourself for maybe a week
or two and just to find out what you are missing and what you are not.
In these days we're talking about ubiquitous computing Whether it will be
computers and processing all around the world.
In every aspect of our daily lives.
What I'm most interested in, is the sort of computing which we are now carrying around
with us. What we still call them, smart phones and it still
like an idea that it is something that we use to communicate with one
person. We pick it up, we answer
and it's a communication channel between two people.
But when you see the way the people are using these things now
It's quite different. We have started to talk of them in
CyberPsychology
as a transitional object. Transition of object
is actually used to refer to something like teddy bear or a security blanket
the children have to wean themselves off their mothers and that
this is how we treat a mobile phones. So, what I would like
everyone to particularly when you are watching this is to take
cognisance of these things. When you're dealing with your mobile phone,
not to think of it as a phone but more of a portal. A portal into a completely new
New Environment
where you have access to all of the information the world has ever had.
This is where an environment
we are still acting in a similar ways to where we are
off-line put in different ways as well. It is a new environment
which we don't yet fully understand. Hope you found this very interesting
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