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Preface
Flame wars in newsgroups. Emotionally laden work emails. Employees fired over the contents of a personal blog. Every day, a lot of smart people say things online that they would never say face-to-face. From time to time, we all say things we regret, but if media reports are to be believed, this happens with alarming frequency online. The question is, why? Does it just take us a while to adjust to any new medium, or is there a deeper underlying cause? Can it be that the Internet changes the pscyhology of how we interact with one another?
As I have studied computer-mediated communication (CMC) over much of the last decade, I have come to believe that the design of new technology can profoundly alter the psychological state of the users of that technology.