ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, the concept of cyberspace has developed from science fiction into a socially constructed reality (Benedikt, 1991; Gibson, 1984). It is now: ‘a place without physical walls or even physical dimensions’, where ‘interaction occurs as if it happened in the real world and in real-time, but constitutes only a “virtual reality”‘(Byassee, 1995: 199; Tribe, 1991: 15). The inhabitants of cyberspace are a virtual community of ‘social aggregations that emerge from the Net 2 when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace’ (Rheingold, 1994: 5). Only time will tell whether or not this virtual community will become Saradar and Ravetz’s ‘new civilisation which emerges through our human-computer interface and mediation’ (1996: 1). What is certain is that the Internet creates considerably more opportunities for individuals to come into contact and to interact with others socially, economically and politically. Furthermore, as the ‘intellectual land grab’ (Boyle, 1996: 125) takes place for cyberspace, the emerging political economy of information capital will cause interests to become established and new distinctions to emerge between acceptable and deviant behaviour. Not only do new risk communities now accompany the old, but many previously acceptable activities have become relabelled as undesirable and now sit next to those behaviours which have been traditionally accepted as undesirable.
