Psychology of Internet and Cyber Space

We all expect our computers and the internet to interact with us. That’s the name of the game. Nevertheless no matter how complex and sophisticated our electronic tools become there will always be moments when they fail to live up to their end of the bargain. There will be moments when software and hardware don’t work properly when noise intrudes into the communication and connections break. There will be moments when our telecommunication systems give us nothing not even an error message. The frustration and anger we experience in reaction to these failures says something about our relationship to our machines and the internet–something about our dependency on them our need to control them. That lack of response also opens the door for us to project all sorts of worries and anxieties onto the machine that gives us no reply. I call these the black hole experiences of cyberspace. Fortunately some computer-mediated environments are more robust than others. Those differences in reliability predictability and dependability are important psychological influences.