ABSTRACT
Sheila Brown’s ‘(S)talking in Cyberspace, Virtuality, Crime and Law’ engages with the ‘reality’ of the cyber by considering some of the new forms of transgression, and adaptations of old forms, arising in the virtual world, and the implications of these for traditional notions of crime, law and social order. The physical and material force of city crime, the aesthetics of fear in the built environment, is replaced by other forms of victimization. All the goalposts within which crime can be conceptualized are irrevocably moved, yet with ‘one foot in the real’ these are hence not only ‘new’ ‘crimes’, but also enhancements of old ones. P. N. Grabosky and R. G. Smith deal with the issue by translating cyberactivity into the language of conventional crime: ‘electronic van-dalism’ including memetic invasion. The dimensions of cyberhate follow the dimensions of race hate, homophobia and misogyny in general; what are different are its accessibility, pervasiveness, and lack of amenability to regulation.
