The cyber worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves

We explore how self-injurers, a group of deviants who primarily were loners, now use the Internet to form subcultural and collegial relations. Drawing on virtual participant-observation in cyber self- injury groups, over eighty face-to-face and telephone in-depth interviews, and over ten thousand e-mail postings to groups and bulletin boards, we describe and analyze the online subcultures of self-injurers. Via the Web, they have become cyber "colleagues," simultaneously enacting two deviant organizational forms and challenging the idea that deviant loners can exist in a cyber society. We further analyze these individuals and their interactions to compare and contrast the venues that they use, the communities and relationships that they form, and their relation to real life. We contribute to symbolic interactionism through our social constructionist stance toward the creation of virtual communities and relationships, our focus on identity and stigma, our view of social organization as grounded in the panoply of human interpersonal relationships, our contrast of the competing reality claims posed by virtual as opposed to the solid world, and our discussion of the modern versus postmodern self.