Great stories sometimes change media; at other times, they simply mirror the change. The Kennedy assassination legitimized broadcast news. The Gulf War made cable the premier medium for breaking news. The death of Elvis Presley helped spawn the tabloid industry. The Simpson trial fused that industry with traditional media.
The Heaven's Gate tragedy is, eerily enough, important in more than the obvious ways. It signals the rise of a fusion between old and new media, between the textual, the visual and the digital - the emergence of the middle media.
The news from Rancho Santa Fe was greeted with particular dread on the Web for different reasons. "Oh, my God," messaged Mano on Friday. "They'll really come after us now. I just watched the eleven o'clock news and the story was 'Are cults brainwashing your children on the Internet?'"
Patchwork Mama, a San Francisco teenager who daily reassures her parents she's not being lured to her doom by online perverts, got a serious "sit-down" 30-minute lecture on cult brainwashing after school Friday. "I hope the defense is ready," she messaged urgently.
Be not afraid, Patchwork. The Net hysteria of the '90s, fueled by opportunistic politicians, manipulable journalists, phobic boomers, displaced intellectuals, and evangelical crusaders, is both temporal and ultimately doomed. If you look carefully at all the hand-wringing about hate-mongering, pornographers, and cultists, you can already see signs of its' waning. The lines between old and new media are rapidly blurring.
"For the techno-libertarians intent on keeping the abstract duchy called cyberspace the freest of all lands," reported The New York Times on Sunday, "the last few months have been a nightmare of bad vibrations rippling through what the electronic elite derisively calls the 'old media.'" Every few days, reported the paper, "television newscasts and newspapers carry reports of unspeakable acts conducted over the Internet. Pedophiles and maybe even prisoners trade pornography and tips on kidnapping, while trying to seduce children in electronic chat rooms. Right-wing lunatics post recipes for explosives and rouse their members with paranoid visions of immense conspiracies that only they can overthrow."
True enough.
But even the Times writer seemed to be debunking these visions, looking over his shoulder at these squawking anti-Net zealots, offering some calm and perspective. The Heaven's Gate suicides, wrote George Johnson, "can only amplify fears that, in some quarters, may be already bordering on hysteria."
Actually, George, these fears don't border on hysteria. They've crossed over into a land awash in full-blown panic. The graphics accompanying your piece, featuring Charles Manson, the John Gotti Tribute Page, Heavens Gate, Nympho, and Nazi Party Web pages probably didn't really help all that much.
But if you read between the lines and look closely between the commercials, the tenor of the Heaven's Gate story suggested a new kind of consciousness. Stuffy CNN kept going proudly to its interactive Web reporter, who pointed out that the Heaven's Gate members earned money off the Web, but weren't created by it. The Times story mentioned above pointed out that the Internet "is an important incubator ... of ideas, both ennobling and debased." And on the Times' op-ed page, David Gelernter of Yale wrote that the Heaven's Gate tragedy said much more about religion than technology.
This message seemed to be getting through. By Monday, the breathlessly reported links between the Heaven's Gate "computer cult" and the Internet seemed clearer, more in perspective, sometimes even bordering on the rational.
The fact is, it's hard to spot the lines between old and new media any longer, and if they are more visible a presence to us, we are less menacing a reality for them. CNN, Time, US News & World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, The Atlantic Monthly, are all on the Web in force. Interactivity is working its wiles on one of our most arrogant and detached public institutions, forcing journalists to learn about new information technology and dragging a few reporters into contact with the passionate citizens of the World Wide Web, who are eager to defend their culture and protect it from the corporate and political exploiters. Although the Times sniffed at webheads Sunday as "techno-libertarians," or members of an "electronic elite," the fact is the Net and the Web comprise a culture people love enough to defend and protect. Can most of the mainstream press claim the same?
The New York Times is no longer writing about Them, but about itself and its leaders. If the Web is a dangerous nuthouse, then what does that say for the growing Times presence here? And for the advertising dollars the paper is trying to lure to its online sites? CNN can no longer simply pass on phobic alarms from moral guardians, but has a substantial investment to protect and, however reluctantly acquired, a growing grasp of truth - there are good and bad things about the Net, as there are good and bad things about music, TV, newspapers, cities, life.
Last year, the San Jose Mercury News kept its controversial "Dark Alliance" story alive by publishing it on the Web. Last month, the Dallas Morning News shocked journalism by breaking a major Timothy McVeigh story on the Web. The impressive New York Times coverage of the Heaven's Gate tragedy - thorough, knowing, and poignant - was linked to online coverage and Web material and clearly influenced by growing awareness of digital culture on the part of the paper's journalists and editors.
Hysterical outbursts in politics and culture are a tradition in America, from Salem to the anti-evolution movement to McCarthyism and the rise of rock and roll. The Net hysteria, too, shall pass, if it hasn't already.
For years, netizens have raged at the distorted and simple-minded way the mainstream media portrayed them. The significance of Heaven's Gate isn't that the journalistic coverage was hysterical and irresponsible - although plenty of it surely was - but that so much of it was rational, accurate, and useful.
Middle media promises to be a critical evolution in the development of information, bringing the good and the bad. It will bring media corporations onto the Web, and, with them, marketers and advertisers. It will be more coherent and less outspoken and idiosyncratic than much of the Net has been. It will be more interactive and less remote and disconnected than much of traditional journalism has become.
In the next few years this, along with demographic changes like the arrival of masses of women and middle-aged people online, will profoundly alter the nature of the Internet.
The ironic truth is that we will look back nostalgically on the days when we circled our digital wagons and shared our secret - the Net in our time has been the safest, freest, most diverse, compelling information culture most of us have ever known. We've shared the exhilarating sense of making a revolution and watching a culture spring up out of the ether. This world isn't about cults or pornography but community, not about danger but freedom.
In an odd way, it's a great gift to get the chance to fight for something. As the coverage of this world inevitably becomes more sophisticated and accurate, our own sense of closeness, community, and excitement will inevitably erode. We will become less exotic, dangerous, and controversial, as we increasingly Web surf alongside quilters, gardeners, politicians, business people, journalists, and postage-stamp collectors.
This will take a while. But in some ways, we are becoming a middle medium, no longer sure where our boundaries end and theirs begin.
So don't worry about anti-Net hysteria. The strange part is, you'll miss it when it's gone.
