Abstract
This paper argues that the significance of technology for contemporary crime and control needs urgent retheorisation. In a context where communications and information technology are having such profound effects upon social interaction, important questions arise about the changing relations between spatial experience, crime and control. The paper suggests that one standard approach here – the claim that communications technology crimes are best explained by reference to them as ‘cybercrimes’ which occur in‘cyberspace’– represents one variant of the failure to properly locate technology within the social. Adopting a Simmelian perspective, the paper advocates considering technology in terms of a geometry of offending behaviours and responses to them – one defined by social interaction rather than the other way around. It is argued that an extended form of social space –a hyperspace – is now evolving, with important implications, not just for our experience and perception of crime, but the kinds of options available for managing it.