ABSTRACT
Atja Franko Aas’s main objective in ‘Beyond “the Desert of the Real”’ is to explore the relations between offline and online aspects of social governance, particularly as they relate to the control of crime. The complexities of contemporary technological culture, however, demand precisely the dissolution of binary oppositions and, more particularly, human/technical splitting in the apprehension of the phenomenon of crime. Life on the screen is not only a space of freedom from terrestrial constraints and governmental intervention but is gradually becoming an essential medium through which contemporary social mobilisations, including those related to crime and punishment, take place. In contrast to the calculated risk management aspects outlined, the Internet also represents a forum for more emotional, often hateful, discourses about deviance and crime control. The extraterritoriality of the Internet and its ingovernability challenge established notions of territorial penal governance.
