Cultists momentarily pushed aside pornographers as the demonic and threatening offspring of new technology. The killings gave our fearful guardians in politics and mainstream media yet another new Net phobia to warn America about. In “Deaths in the Family” on HotWired, Jon Katz said:
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A groan passed across the Net as members of the community wondered whether the actions of the cultists might influence public policy at a particularly vulnerable time, when free speech and openness, and the Net's importance as an electronic town hall, was a matter of public debate ). The suicides and the media's blinkered condemnation came fresh on the heels of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which had been argued with mixed success before the Supreme Court on March 19 (but which was overturned on June 26 ). The virtual community reacted with outrage. It seemed to be enough that the group had a Web presence business and used the online medium among other media to disseminate messages to declare the Net guilty by association. There was abundant coverage of the curiosities – the castrations, the purple shrouds, the comet, The X-Files– but little about the individual cult members as celebrated Webmasters. continued, “Here was obsession, delusion and mass suicide played out in multimedia and hypertext – a horror, finally, best observed online.” Yet most of the early reports spent disappointingly little time looking at Heaven's Gate online. The Heaven's Gate techno-deaths delivered the sensationalist goods. As Joshua Quittner wrote in “Life and Death on the Web” in Time, “Every time this country extrudes any significant bit of evil at its fringes my editors dispatch me to the Internet to look for its source”.
Nevertheless like William Gibson who coined the term, the press seems deeply ambivalent about cyberspace and its populace. In practice, of course, the Net is in itself neither a utopian nor a dystopian place, but rather is made up of people who for the most part are sitting in front of monitors and keyboards exchanging commonplace information a bit more conveniently, if often with a sense of “virtual community” within “cyberspace”. Since the first Internet covers of Time and Newsweek in 1992–93 that legitimized and sensationalized the Internet, followed by the mainstream popularity of the World Wide Web, the Net has been vilified as often as it's been hailed as a panacea to the world's ills, a late twentieth-century electronic Eldorado. These “keys to the kingdom” link to further information on the Heaven's Gate home page, which serves as the cult's suicidenote and mission statement.
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