Unmasking the Digital Mindset: An Introduction to the Psychology Behind Online Communication
Course | Introductory | Module | 4
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what is not said.”
~ Peter Drucker
Introduction: Unmasking the Digital Mindset
From company emails and messages with friends to online shopping and Google searches, our online activities play a key role in our professional and personal lives. As a result, it is useful for us to gain a basic understanding of how we think about these activities, as well as the ways in which online communication can influence our online behaviour.
To do this, we need to delve into some basic explanations for how our minds interpret the information we receive online. By gaining a solid understanding of these ideas, we can ultimately change the way that we think about our online safety to better protect ourselves from potential dangers.
In line with this, we will now explore three key psychological principles that will help us with unmasking our digital mindsets.
Principle 1: The Assumed Ephemerality of Text
We already know that most types of online communication are asynchronous, meaning that we do not receive immediate responses from the individuals with whom we are communicating. But these delays also point to another key feature of written forms of online communication: they are, for the most part, permanent. With the obvious exception of disappearing messages on platforms like WhatsApp, this means that senders can edit their messages, while recipients are able to re-read them as many times as they would like.
Despite this, we have a tendency to think about online communication in much the same way that we do verbal, in-person communication. Often, we will send a message with the assumption that the recipient will read it once before writing an immediate response – just as someone would voice an instant reply while speaking face-to-face. This assumption that our messages are ephemeral (or short-lived) in the context of our online conversations has a number of implications for our online behaviour.
The first and most important of these implications is that we may feel pressured to respond to any messages we receive as quickly as possible. As a result, we may not take time to re-read messages before replying or taking action, which can make us more likely to fall prey to online scams.
The second implication is that we may not re-read our own messages before sending them, which can increase the chances of a misunderstanding taking place. Ultimately, it is in our best interests to proofread our messages in order to ensure that we are being respectful to the individuals with whom we are communicating.
Principle 2: Mindlessness
In a previous article, we explored the concept of mindfulness and noted that it can be defined as the “process of actively noticing new things”. However, there is another related concept that plays an equally important role in shaping our online interactions: the concept of mindlessness.
Unlike mindfulness, mindlessness describes a mental state in which we take very little active notice of what is happening around us. We can compare it to using autopilot in a car, or to when we do something routine, like brushing our hair or making a cup of tea. Often, when we perform these kinds of routine activities, we give very little conscious thought to them. This can lead to us making silly or easily avoidable mistakes, like putting the milk in the pantry, instead of back in the fridge, after making a cup of tea.
Ultimately, the more routine or commonplace an activity is, the more likely we are to be mindless of what we are doing. In the context of the online activities that we perform on a daily basis, this can pose a serious threat to our online safety, which leads us to our third psychological principle: the Routine Activities Theory.
Principle 3: Routine Activities Theory
Developed by researchers Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson, this theory suggests that one of the key factors to influence criminal activity is the availability of ‘suitable targets’. In the world of online scams, a suitable target is most often someone who is not actively aware of their digital surroundings, and who takes hasty actions – like clicking on hyperlinks – without thinking about the potential consequences.
This means that the more mindless we are about our online activities, the more suitable of a target we become for online scams. At the same time, the more we rely on online platforms in our personal and professional lives, the more likely we are to be mindless about our online activities. So, how can we combat this?
Online Safety: Habit vs Skill
To prevent ourselves from being mindless about our online activities, and to avoid falling prey to online scams, we need to change the way that we have come to view our online safety as a mere habit. Instead, we need to learn to treat it as a skill that we can constantly improve and develop.
The reason for this becomes clear when we compare the definition for a habit against that of a skill. While a habit is considered an automatic reaction to a given situation, a skill describes our ability to use our knowledge effectively in both new and familiar contexts. This means that treating our online safety as a habit is more likely to lead to mindlessness, because a habit is essentially a static or unchanging part of a routine.
In contrast, by treating online safety as a skill, we can constantly work to increase our knowledge about the risks associated with our online activities. This will allow us to maintain an active awareness of our digital surroundings, and to improve our ability to protect ourselves from potential dangers online.
Conclusion:
Over the course of this article, we have developed our understanding of online safety through the lens of psychology by exploring three key principles related to our online behaviour. We also used our knowledge of these psychological principles, and in particular that of mindlessness, to explain the importance of treating online safety as a skill rather than a habit. In the next article, we will develop this further by uncovering some of the major psychological methods that are used by cybercriminals to trick us into falling for their online scams.