ABSTRACT
New technologies, new identities ‘Identity’ is a term which is probably in danger of becoming overused in contemporary social sciences. I can, for example, borrow at least 20 ‘identity readers’ from my university library, a number of them addressing the issues of identity and cyber culture, virtual culture, the internet, etc. However, while books about identity and cyber culture are gradually filling the bookshelves, the question of how the new technologies reshape identities in everyday penal practices has received considerably less attention (see, for example, Ericson and Haggerty 1997, Jewkes 2003, Lyon 2001). Who are we and, more crucially, who are the others, when we communicate about crime and punish with the help of computers? The issue gains additional salience when we are faced with the growing technological paraphernalia used in the present ‘war on terror’.
