The present study seeks to understand how criminal hackers self-report to desist from the world of cybercrime. In doing so, we address significant gaps in criminological literature, as little is known about pathways out of cybercrime offending. Interviews were conducted with 22 individuals involved in cyber-dependent crime, primarily from the Netherlands. Of these, 15 respondents were justice-involved youth and 7 respondents self-identified as criminal hackers. The interviews offer unique insights into the stages offenders navigate following their involvement in cybercrime. Findings reveal that young hackers may be susceptible to behavioral change through various mechanisms. Desistance from cybercrime is a process that warrants a multidisciplinary perspective, influenced particularly by social bonds, prosocial daily routines, and deterrent experiences. A combination of police intervention and alternative approaches that emphasize ethical application of skills may be a promising route for young hackers in particular, although actual intervention effects remain unverified. We encourage evaluations of current programs for hackers as well as additional quantitative assessments of protective factors among cybercrime offenders.
Taking photos to manage memories with smartphones is a routine strategy in the digital era. However, it remains unclear how smartphone photo-taking affects memory performance and self-evaluation. This research examined whether smartphone photo-taking is associated with a pattern consistent with the “Google effect,” and whether these associations vary with self-expansion via smartphone use. Across three experiments ( N = 363), participants photographed or observed materials before completing memory tests and measures of cognitive self-esteem. Study 1 tested the basic photo-taking effect; Study 2a examined device ownership as a contextual proxy for smartphone self-expansion; and Study 2b examined trait self-expansion as a continuous moderator. Results showed a photo-taking-impairment effect on memory, alongside higher cognitive self-esteem following photo-taking. Moreover, higher smartphone self-expansion was associated with stronger increases in cognitive self-esteem and greater memory overestimation, whereas its role in objective memory impairment remained inconclusive. Altogether, the findings suggest that smartphone photo-taking can reduce memory performance while increasing cognitive self-esteem.
Digital surveillance infrastructures are widely critiqued for their use-side problems of access, privacy, and discrimination, but meaningful intervention requires understanding how these infrastructures are developed and stabilized in the first place. This paper examines China’s health code systems (HCSs) as a revelatory case of path dependence in the development of digital surveillance infrastructures. Drawing on news, first-hand interviews, and fieldwork, we trace how local governments chose to embed contact-tracing systems within the pre-existing digital ecosystems of Alipay and WeChat, primarily at the local level. Such choices persisted despite the central government’s openly cautious stance toward private tech giants and its subsequent attempts to develop independent alternatives. We describe this trajectory as surveillance path dependence, in which the convergence of pre-existing technological foundations, tight temporal pressure, and institutional incentives within a fragmented authoritarian institutional context locked new applications into established digital surveillance paths. This study suggests that mitigating the adverse societal impacts of large-scale digital surveillance requires intervening directly in the foundational design and institutional deployment of digital ecosystems rather than at the level of use-side effects.
Digital platforms reallocate scarce consumer attention, yet the externalities generated within these ecosystems and their heterogeneous reception across culturally distinct audiences remain poorly understood. Against this backdrop, this study investigates whether major digital spectacles can trigger cultural attention spillovers, exploiting the release of Black Myth : Wukong as a quasi-natural experiment. Utilizing rich bilingual user reviews from the Steam platform, we deploy a supervised machine learning pipeline to construct a quantifiable metric of cultural utility attribution. Employing a difference-in-differences (DD) design coupled with coarsened exact matching (CEM) to address selection bias, we find that this profound cultural shock structurally recalibrates consumer attention. Robust to pre-trend validations and traffic controls, the incidence rate of culturally oriented reviews for incumbent games sharing Chinese cultural elements increased by approximately 11.9%. Crucially, these spillovers are highly directional and bounded. Pre-existing associative memory acts as a binding constraint for translating the technological shock into sustained cultural attention. Transforming heritage into interactive digital experiences offers an effective approach to activate dormant cultural assets. From a practical perspective, flagship digital spectacles can generate positive attention externalities that systematically reduce attention frictions for related digital goods.
This study examines structural inequalities in feminist knowledge production by analyzing 11,060 Scopus indexed articles published between 1936 and 2024. Using bibliometric indicators, statistical citation analysis, and topic modeling, the study found that Western affiliated scholars dominate both output and recognition, whereas non-Western voices remain numerically and symbolically marginalized. The findings highlight how “Westernization” operates not only through citation advantage but also through thematic centrality: scholarship from Western institutions often sets the agenda in areas such as digital activism and intersectionality, while non-Western contributions, often centered on decolonial critique, grassroots mobilization, and local contexts, receive less global visibility. Mixed teams improve recognition among non-Western scholars but do not close the structural gap, suggesting that collaboration narrows inequalities without redistributing epistemic authority. To explain these dynamics, this study introduces the concept of academic passporting , whereby Western institutional affiliations function as strong passports that confer recognition and visibility, whereas non-Western affiliations operate as weak passports, unless stamped through Western collaboration. These findings have implications for diversifying scholarly practices, rethinking theoretical frameworks, and shaping equitable research policies.
