ABSTRACT
Atja Franko Aas’s (2007) main objective in ‘Beyond “the Desert of the Real”’, is to explore the relations between offline and online aspects of social governance, particularly as they relate to the control of crime. Aas presents a case for criminologists to engage more fully with the cyber and to integrate cyber concerns and cyber life into the mainstream of criminological research and writing. Drawing from recent work by Sheila Brown (see also Reading 39), and others, she challenges the conventional binary oppositions that have contributed to keeping criminological study of the cyber on the margins. As a number of readings in this collection make clear (Readings 6, 7, 39), the once rigid boundaries separating natural and artificial, technological and social, physical and virtual, represented and real are becoming increasingly permeable and blurred. Thus to continue considering, as many criminologists have, the cyber – and the crimes that take place there – as a distinct realm with distinct rules, is to fail to recognise the ‘hybridity’ of reality and the varying degrees of virtuality discernible in many contemporary forms of crime and control. Building on the notion of ‘simulation’ first developed by Jean Baudrillard (1981 – Reading 6), Aas illustrates the significance for contemporary criminology of the blurred distinction between the virtual and the real by systematically considering issues of communities and community safety, surveillance and supervision, extraterritoriality and solidarity, and social and cyber governance. K
