Matthew Williams, Virtually criminal: Crime deviance and regulation online, Routledge: London & New York, 2006
| Published date | 01 February 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895810370339 |
| Date | 01 February 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
11(1) 91–96
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895810370339
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Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Matthew Williams, Virtually criminal: Crime deviance and regulation online,
Routledge: London & New York, 2006
Reviewed by: Peter Grabosky, Australian National University, Australia
Woody Allen’s classic film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) depicts a Depression-era wife
who works at a dead-end job and suffers a slothful husband who is preoccupied with
liquor and gambling. Her means of escape is the cinema, to which she retreats at every
opportunity. She sits through a particular film, featuring her screen idol, a number of times
until her hero stops in the middle of one scene, begins a conversation with her, then leaves
the screen and joins her in the audience. The stunned actors in this ‘film-within-a-film’,
abandoned by their male lead, sit around playing cards and quarreling, while members of
the audience demand their money back.
This cinematic contrivance is, of course, a variation on the ‘play within a play’ which
Shakespeare used to great effect in classics such as Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer
Night’s Dream, and Hamlet. Most people know the difference between reality and repre-
sentation. Shakespeare certainly did. Nevertheless, a great deal of ink has been spilled
conflating the two.
More recently, this conflation has plagued that corner of cyberspace populated by
online chat rooms and more elaborate meeting places such as Cyberworlds. The confu-
sion this creates can make it difficult for some people to differentiate between physical
violence in the real world, textual descriptions of violence that are introduced in simu-
lated environments or are posted online, and the use of digital technology in further of
physical violence (such as the alteration of a hospital data base in a manner that results
in the death of a patient).
Based on participant observation in an online community, this book is an interesting
study of informal social control. If the author were starting afresh, I would advise him to
stick to issues of online etiquette and nongovernmental social control, and leave crime to
others. The book’s typology of cybercrime is flawed, and fails to do justice either to legal
classification or to logic. For example, the discussion of cybertheft refers to piracy and
to theft of credit card details, but ignores electronic funds transfer theft, such as the theft
of Citibank funds in the 1990s.
The data collected for this book or in future studies might be used for an interesting test
of Donald Black’s theory of law. It suggests that newcomers to the community act and are
acted upon differently than old-timers. It invites the question, How important is relational
distance in the informal governance of cyberspace? One might also have wished that the
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