The Cyber Effect (6 page)

As far as we know, Weiner was not an open-raincoat type—a guy who flashed women on the street in order to shock them. Rather,
he befriended female strangers online and quickly transformed informal chitchat about politics and policy into a sexually explicit exchange—unprovoked and unwanted sexts.

The practice of sexting, or exchanging intimate text and images online, is increasingly popular behavior, almost normalized, but nonetheless it's an awfully high-risk practice for a public figure like Weiner. In his case, the behavior was so reckless, it defies logic. I can't help but wonder what other factors were at play—and what he hoped to gain that was so important to him in the moment. Was it a need for power or to shock women? Or both?

A recent
study at Ohio State University demonstrated that
men who post a lot of selfies—particularly if they were edited or Photoshopped beforehand—scored higher on measures of narcissism and psychopathy
than men who didn't. Narcissism is the belief that you're smarter, more attractive, and better than others. Psychopathy is characterized by egocentric and antisocial activity. Follow-up work suggests that the same findings apply to women. Both the narcissist and the exhibitionist are hungry for feedback or some reaction to their behavior. There is a self-reinforcing cycle: When a selfie is posted, it leads to feedback, which encourages the posting of more selfies. “We are all concerned with our self-presentation online,” said Dr. Jesse Fox, the lead author of the Ohio State study, “but how we do that may reveal something about our personality.”

Weiner revealed a lot more than personality. There are still a few of his explicit selfies available online—the staying power of images online is another reason why this kind of behavior is so risky for public figures—and an interesting study could be made of them, in terms of what's called “content analysis,” or the forensic analysis of the content of an image, typically the subject, pose, environment, identifying objects, and other details that can provide a lot of information.

I have conducted extensive research in image-content analysis, and I'm now in the process of developing a software tool that will help police to extrapolate more data and information from an image. For this tool, I have organized content analysis into five categories, ranging from demographic detail (age, gender, and ethnicity) to situational (identifying objects, environment, and setting). I have developed a grid system to apply to each image that breaks it into segments to be analyzed individually. Each segment can be zoomed into and methodically investigated, much like a systematic room-to-room search done by police.

I used my systematic approach to analyze one of Weiner's sexts that was cropped to make it fit for publication in the New York
Daily News
, and it's fascinating how many identifying details there are. In a classic “power shot,” he shows off his bare torso and flexed pecs, and behind him, on a narrow table over his right shoulder, is an array of framed personal and professional photographs. Was this unintended? A person taking a selfie can be either disinhibited—lost in the moment and oblivious of surroundings—or quite conscious and therefore carefully staging the image, and designing it to impress. In forensics, “staging”
means deliberately falsifying a crime scene (when the offender alters the evidence), but in this case, I am using the common definition of
staging
—setting a scene in order to make a certain impression.

Once again, the key word used to distinguish between a behavior and a true disorder is
distress
. Clearly Weiner's behavior was persistent enough, and distressful enough, to destroy a political career that he had been diligently polishing and honing for decades. What would drive a man to such risky behavior and cause him to become an object of such incredible ridicule? Unfortunately for him, his name still elicits laughter.

I call this
cyber-exhibitionism
. It appears to be a mutation of real-world behavior and part of a new generation of paraphilia in cyberspace, where there is better reach, a wider audience, more victims, compromised judgment, more risk-taking, heightened distress, and, most important, permanent digital records. For an individual with the sorts of apparent needs and vulnerabilities that Weiner demonstrates, the forces of online disinhibition, escalation, and impulsivity are enormously powerful. And enormously destructive. One of the earliest forms of cyber-exhibitionism, “JenniCam,” came out of a university art project. A young woman broadcast from her dorm room 24/7, which eventually escalated to her allowing viewers to watch her nude, then to allowing viewers to watch her having sex.

The nature of the relationship between voyeur and exhibitionist is symbiotic, almost parasitic, and explains the phenomenon of reality TV. In a later chapter on teenagers and technology, I will discuss sexting or nude selfies as part of the courtship ritual among young people, and also a mild form of cyber-exhibitionism.

A bizarre case in the U.K. recently showed how criminal and deviant behavior, facilitated by technology, is continually evolving. In 2015, Lorraine Crighton-Smith was traveling on a train in South London when her iPhone was suddenly bombarded with explicit photos of a man's genitals. The thirty-four-year-old woman, shocked by the first image, instantly declined it. As soon as she did, another image appeared. Then she realized that she had switched on “Airdrop” on her phone to share photos with a friend who was also an iPhone user. By mistake, her privacy setting for Airdrop was put on “everyone” instead
of “contacts only.” This allowed her phone to be accessed by someone sitting nearby on the train, which takes the new term
cyber-exhibitionism
to a new place.

Two years after his sexting scandal, Weiner announced his candidacy for New York City mayor, hoping that the electorate had moved on—or forgotten. But the Internet is unforgiving. More sexts surfaced. To stifle more controversy, he quickly acknowledged that he had continued to cyber-flash and send explicit images online to at least three women in 2012. Hoping to stay in the race, he and his wife appeared at a press conference together, where he apologized: “
I want to again say that I am very sorry to anyone who was on the receiving end of these messages and the disruption this has caused.”

Refusing to drop out, he hung on—and forty-eight hours before the primary, he mused, “
Maybe if the Internet didn't exist…if I was running in 1955…I'd probably get elected mayor.”
Instead, he lost the mayoral primary with less than 5 percent of the vote.

On his disastrous election day, when reporters asked Weiner what he planned to do next,
he whipped out his middle finger and flipped the bird. Perhaps the next best thing to the open raincoat.

Another paraphilia that has migrated and morphed significantly online is
voyeurism
, also known as
scopophilia
—or the recurrent preoccupation with fantasies and acts that involve observing persons who are naked or engaged in grooming or sexual activity. What once was simply the classic “peeping Tom” has been impacted by technology in the past century by the invention of the camera.

A case of this in the real world involved a prominent rabbi in Washington, D.C., who hid a small camera inside the ritual bath of the National Capital Mikvah, next to the Kesher Israel Congregation in Georgetown. When female congregants came to the basement bath and shed their clothes to practice the ancient sacred purification rite of dunking in the water and reciting a blessing, a small digital camera hidden inside a clock radio took their pictures.

In 2014,
Rabbi Barry Freundel, renowned as an authority on Jewish
law and ethics and an “intellectual giant,” according to the
Washington Post
, was charged with six counts of voyeurism and faced up to six years in prison. Eventually, he pleaded guilty to fifty-two counts of voyeurism. Prosecutors identified a further one hundred recordings of women, but these fell outside the statute of limitations. In May 2015, Freundel was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

Over the past few decades, there have been cases of this kind of privacy violation—cameras hidden behind hotel-room mirrors, cameras hidden in women's bathrooms. The lawmakers hoping to protect individuals from privacy violations have always raced to keep up with technological changes. Imagine if a voyeur with a persistent disorder like Rabbi Freundel's found ways to access the webcams of a young woman's computer? What if he were able to access dozens of these webcams at once?

This brings me to our last story of the chapter.

Five months before Cassidy Wolf, of Temecula, California, was crowned Miss Teen USA in 2013, the poised and picture-perfect nineteen-year-old received an anonymous email from a man who had hacked into her computer and gained control of its webcam. With it, he had spied on Wolf in her bedroom. How?

The voyeur had surreptitiously installed malicious software on Wolf's computer, using some form of Remote Access Trojan, or RAT, that can be bought online for as little as forty dollars. He told Wolf that he would release images that he'd gotten from her webcam unless she complied with one of his three demands: send nude photos, send a nude video, or log on to Skype and do whatever the hacker asked for five minutes.

No dummy, Wolf contacted authorities immediately, and an FBI investigation was launched. Three months later,
Jared James Abrahams, a nineteen-year-old man who had gone to high school with Wolf, was arrested. He had gained control of twelve different women's webcams and had hacked into an estimated 100 to 150 other computers, and was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Raising awareness of cybercrime became Wolf's mission during her year as Miss Teen USA. “
I wasn't aware that somebody was watching me,” she told an interviewer. The light on her webcam hadn't even gone
on. While traveling the country, she offered tips for cyber-security: change passwords frequently, delete browsing history regularly, and—most important—put a sticker over the computer's webcam lens when you're not using it.

The webcam may be technology's greatest gift to the voyeur. Considering that
more than 70 million computers were purchased in the United States in 2015 alone, not to mention the preexisting devices—the smartphones, tablets, and desktops with cameras that connect to the Internet—it's daunting to imagine the spying capabilities of voyeurs.

A new sexual freedom has been spawned by the Internet—encouraged by the effects of anonymity, cyber-socialization, online syndication, disinhibition, and escalation—and even given rise to new or formerly
unknown fetishes like cranking. The cyberpsychological reality: One can easily stumble upon a behavior online and immerse oneself in new worlds and new communities, and become cyber-socialized to accept activities that would have been unacceptable just a decade ago. The previously unimaginable is now at your fingertips—just waiting to be searched.

Technology isn't the problem. It's that we don't yet know the full effects of the cyber environment or where it is taking us. Like the beginning of many kinds of life adventures, sexual exploration on the Internet can be exciting at first. You may tell yourself you are just dipping your toe in the water. But what if that water feels great
—just wonderful
. And what if, soon afterward, all you can think about is getting your toe back in that water again. Before long, you may be bouncing on the diving board and jumping in. How can you resist?

And when is it time to stop?

S
oon after
Alexandra Tobias, a twenty-two-year-old mother in Florida, called 911 to report that her three-month-old son, Dylan, had stopped breathing and needed resuscitation, she told investigators that the baby was pushed off the sofa by the family dog and hit his head on the floor. Later, full of regret and sorrow, she confessed to police that she was playing
FarmVille
on her computer and had lost her temper when little Dylan's crying distracted her from the Facebook game. She picked up her baby and began shaking him violently, and his head had hit her computer. At the hospital, he was pronounced dead from head injuries and a broken leg.

At the time of the 2010 incident,
FarmVille
, a wildly popular online game where players become virtual farmers who raise crops and livestock, had 60 million active users. Described in glowing terms as “highly addictive” by its fans, there was eventually a need for FAA (
FarmVille
Addicts Anonymous) support groups, and even an FAA page on Facebook itself. Can we say that Alexandra Tobias was addicted? Is the explanation that simple? Her virtual cattle were doing fine, but her real life was in ruins.

During her trial, she pleaded guilty and showed great remorse, and in a statement said that she hoped to attend college and make something
of herself someday. Her own mother had died recently, she said, and Tobias hadn't felt like herself ever since. She received the maximum sentence in Florida for second-degree murder: fifty years. She'll be in jail for most, if not all, of the rest of her life.

As a forensic cyberpsychologist, I am interested in this sad and disturbing case for one reason: the role of technology in the escalation of an explosive act of violence. In a nutshell, that is extreme
impulsivity
, an unplanned spontaneous act. And in this case, with devastating consequences.

We are all impulsive to a degree. Some people are by nature more spontaneous than others, more likely to act on a whim without too much thought, whether the behavior is driven by joy or anger. One of the beliefs of our culture is that people reach the end of their lives and wish they'd taken more chances and risks. This may be true for restrained, risk-averse individuals. But extremely impulsive individuals would probably say the opposite: It's not the things they didn't do that they regret. It's the ones they did.

There are risks that reward us and risks that ruin us. The same goes for the hours we spend online. This chapter will discuss many aspects of the Internet that are irresistible—whether it's multiplayer gaming, email checking, social-network posting, or bidding on an auction site. Given a host of cyber effects, we may sometimes feel like slaves to our impulses. Why?

What is impulsivity? It is defined as “a personality trait characterized by the urge to act spontaneously without reflecting on an action and its consequences.” The trait of impulsiveness influences several important psychological processes and behaviors, including self-regulation, risk-taking, and decision-making. It has been found to be a significant component of several clinical conditions, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the manic phase of bipolar disorder, as well as alcohol and drug abuse and pathological gambling.

Researchers studying attention and self-control often assess impulsiveness
using personality questionnaires, notably the common Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, which has been used for the past two decades and was updated in 2014 by a group of researchers at Duke University. It's a really fascinating area of interest—and the test,
a list of thirty simple statements to be agreed or disagreed with, can be taken in a matter of ten or fifteen minutes. The statements are easy to answer: “I plan tasks carefully,” “I am happy-go-lucky,” “I am future oriented,” “I like puzzles,” “I save regularly,” and “I am restless at the theater or lectures.” You can find the entire test online, but the results need to be assessed by a professional, so taking it on your own, you won't wind up with a final score. Reading over a few of the statements will give you some insight into the three types of impulsivity, which can be physical (difficulty sitting still), cognitive (difficulty concentrating), and sensory (difficulty resisting sensory rewards).

A highly impulsive individual—in all three aspects of impulsivity—tends to be restless, happy-go-lucky, uninterested in planning ahead or saving, not future-oriented. In common parlance, he or she might be described as ADD or ADHD, but it's a bit more complicated than that. When a child is diagnosed with an
executive function disorder
, like ADHD or other attention-related problem, one of the likely aspects of this is something described as suppressed
response inhibition, which is generally defined as the inability to suppress an urge to do something, even when environmental contingencies demand it. In other words, the world is telling these children not to do something—“Don't stand up on the bus!”—and telling them why it's a bad idea, but their ability to restrain themselves just isn't there.

A person who is diagnosed as having obsessive-compulsive disorder shares the trait of impulsivity and suppressed response inhibition with ADHD, but he or she finds urges extremely hard to control—and stop. This same trait has been observed in alcoholics, cocaine addicts, heroin- and other substance-dependent patients, as well as smokers. Recent studies have also found impulsivity to be positively correlated with excessive computer game playing and
excessive Internet use in general.

Before I go into this subject any deeper, I want to discuss the difference between
impulsive
and
compulsive
. In everyday conversation, we tend to use these two terms almost interchangeably, as if they meant
the same thing. But they are actually at opposite ends of a spectrum of behavior. While impulsive behavior is a rash, unplanned act, such as Alexandra Tobias's rage at being interrupted while playing
FarmVille
, compulsive behavior is planned repetitive behavior, like obsessive hand washing or cranking, as discussed in the previous chapter about paraphilia.

Let's describe these in cyber terms. When you constantly pick up your mobile phone to check your Twitter feed, that's compulsive. When you read a nasty tweet and can't restrain yourself from responding with an equally nasty retort (or an even nastier one), that's impulsive.

What makes the Internet so alluring? Why do some individuals struggle more than others to pull themselves away from their mobile phones and computer screens?

Why does anybody buy a Powerball lottery ticket if they know the chances of winning are one in 300 million? For some of the very same reasons that keep people playing any number of beguiling online activities. When we invest time playing
League of Legends
or spend money on the lottery, we know that there's little chance of “hitting it big.” Sporadically, though, small rewards do come, and these
intermittent rewards
, as they're called, bring us back again and again.

It's an accepted fact in behavioral psychology that intermittent reinforcement is much more effective at motivating people than continuous rewards. If you are rewarded randomly for an activity, you are likely to continue doing it—far more likely than if you are rewarded each and every time. A famous
study of pigeons demonstrated this: When pigeons were consistently rewarded for a certain activity, they did not necessarily continue the activity. But they were much more responsive, and much more prone to act, when given intermittent reinforcement. Maximum responsiveness was achieved when they were rewarded half the time.

Here's how it works with scratch-off tickets: You are asked, say, to scratch off six squares on a card and reveal the numbers hidden underneath. You will win if you uncover three matching numbers. In terms
of rewards, just the act of scratching off the hidden numbers is a little exciting. A drama is unfolding, and that creates expectancy, which has been found to deliver a little
dopamine to the brain. Dopamine is an organic chemical released in the brain that helps us regulate movement and emotional responses, and is also associated with pleasurable feelings. More than 110,000 research papers have been written about dopamine in the past sixty years. In pursuit of the pleasure it gives us, we do things that release it. What is fascinating and underresearched is the role of technology in this process.

Most scratch-off cards are designed to lose. But they are also designed with many matching symbols. Why? You scratch the card, a sequence of matching symbols begins to appear, and you get excited thinking that you may win. For a thrilling second, or two, or three, you believe your card is a winner. In the gambling trade, this tease is
called “a heart-stopper,” because it can give you a surge of excitement, a little buzz of pleasure. This is classic positive reinforcement. So even when you don't win, that temporary buzz of excitement is enough to bring you some pleasure and reinforce card-scratching behavior. And later, the biochemical and psychological memory of that pleasure is enough to keep you in the feedback loop, and buying more lottery tickets. It's not a huge blast of pleasure, mind you, but it's just enough.

This is what conditioning is all about.

When any behavior is rewarded with pleasure, you are more likely to repeat it. The psychology of a casino slot machine works the same way. Three wheels of the slot machine are spinning—and showing you all those matching pairs. Two wheels stop. And if the symbols match, it's a heart-stopper moment. The third wheel stops, and you lose. But somehow, it felt fun anyway.

In game design this is called “fun failure.” Even though you are failing miserably, you aren't miserable. Why? That biochemical pleasure hit makes all the difference. And the mere act of anticipating winning is fun. This is what keeps people buying lottery cards, feeding a slot machine, or playing
Candy Crush Saga
.

Who hasn't felt the draw of the cyber fun-failure vortex? Who hasn't wasted time or money or both online and still managed to feel it was fun? There is more to it than heart-stoppers. Each type of online activity
has its own attractions, extra built-in rewards that condition users to return.

Why is the mere act of searching online so hypnotically compelling? Why are the alerts and notifications on a mobile phone impossible to ignore? Since my interest is in forensic cyberpsychology—and therefore I am a bit more focused on pathological behavior than the average person—I have to look at how the various rewards of being online may have a dark side for some people, and what the implications are for the rest of us.

If you start simply with psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous “hierarchy of needs”—the needs that demand our attention and motivate human beings to survive, adapt, and evolve—you'll see them all met online in one manner or another: from physiological needs to needs for safety, love, belonging, esteem, self-knowledge, and self-actualization.

Online anonymity offers you a sense of safety. Joining an online community, or participating in a multiplayer online game, can give you a sense of belonging. Getting your Instagram photos or Facebook posts “liked” meets a need for esteem. But that's just the beginning of social-networking rewards and pleasures. According to psychiatrist and author Dr. Eva Ritvo in her article “Facebook and Your Brain,” social networking “
stimulates the release of loads of dopamine as well as offering an effective cure to loneliness. Novelty also triggers these ‘feel good' chemicals.” Apart from getting high on likes, posting information about yourself can also deliver pleasure. About 40 percent of daily speech is normally taken up with self-disclosure—telling others how we feel or what we think about something—but when we go online the amount of self-disclosure doubles to 80 percent. According to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, this produces
a brain response similar to the release of dopamine.

Searching online—whether you are hunting down a piece of information, shopping for a pair of shoes, or looking for an old classmate or professional contact—rewards you in another powerful way. Which brings me to a favorite subject of mine, the fascinating real-world work
of Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who coined the term
affective neuroscience
, or the biology of arousing feelings or emotions.

Panksepp conducted laboratory experiments on rats and discovered what he calls the “seeking” system, something that drives both humans and animals to seek information that will help them survive. Dopamine-energized, this mesolimbic seeking system encourages foraging, exploration, investigation, curiosity, craving, and expectancy. In other words, dopamine fires each time the rat (or human) explores its environment. Panksepp, who has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain, calls seeking “the granddaddy of the systems.” Emily Yoffe in
Slate
explains: “
It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world.” Seeking is so stimulating, according to scientist Temple Grandin, that animals in captivity would prefer to hunt or seek out their food rather than have it delivered to them.

If we think about this in Darwinian terms, Panksepp is essentially arguing that a number of instincts such as seeking, play, anger, lust, panic, grief, and fear are embedded in ancient regions of the human brain or are, as he describes them, evolutionary memories “built into the nervous system at a fundamental level.” To Panksepp, these instincts may be considered adaptive traits so fundamental, and so essential to our survival, that they may even constitute
what we think of as our “core-self.”

I seek, therefore I am?

You don't need to sing the joys of seeking and exploring to police detectives, investigative journalists, and research scientists. Way before the advent of the Internet, they were experiencing the thrills and rewards of discovery. The drive to seek and explore has kept the human race alive and fed for centuries. But it's Panksepp's work that provides us with a biochemical explanation: The dopamine rewards of seeking and foraging have probably made human beings highly adaptable to new environments. We are rewarded for exploring. One could easily argue that the same reward system, or reinforcement, has made human beings more adaptable to the new environment we are still discovering online.