ABSTRACT
As I write this chapter, a little more than ten years after the events of Heaven’s Gate, the language used to describe the Internet at the time of the suicides seems almost quaint by comparison with online phenomena such as Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter. When logging on to the World Wide Web, for example, read one USA Today sidebar the day the story broke, “Web pages are viewable using software called a ‘browser,”’ and readers “can see information displayed in magazine-style ‘pages,’” some of which “have sounds and even snippets of video or animation” (Miller, 1997). The Web pages designed by Higher Source, reported Deutsche Presse-Agentur, were apparently “state-of-the-art” and came “complete with moving graphics” (McIntyre, 1997). In a segment headlined “Protecting kids from cults on the Internet,” ABC News technology correspondent and “computer editor” Gina Smith talked Bill Ritter, then host of Good Morning America, the network’s flagship infotainment program, through the basics of using a generic search engine (Smith and Ritter, 1997b). In less than two decades, however, from the creation of the World Wide Web and the first generation of Web browsers, the Internet has gone from a technological curiosity to an indispensible part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people. And, although in the mid1990s many of us were dazzled by its possibilities, for those hundreds of millions today the Web is no more remarkable than the telephone, and its effects no more inherently insidious.
