unfamiliar history of the Internet, one that tracks death’s so-far limited
influence on online culture. Through this history, we can glimpse the
future of social media, a future in which death makes room for itself in
a culture that failed to make room for it.
Other Worlds
In the early days of the web, people most commonly understood cyber-
space as an alternate, virtual world rather than a digital map of our own
world. The developer Jaron Lanier, who helped shaped the course of
computer science in the early ’80s, in his book You Are Not a Gadget,
describes a question laymen commonly asked about these “strange tech-
nologies” he helped to develop: “Would they be trapped in it, unable to
escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live?”
Naïve as the question sounds to us thirty years later, it helps illustrate
the essentially paradoxical nature of the Internet. On one hand, we can
view the web as most of us view it today—simply as a medium like tele-
phones or radios. On the other hand, we still speak of the Internet as
a place we “go” to. And no matter how often we go there, there is still
something otherworldly about it.
Twenty years ago, the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, lived in a Web 2.0
world, five years before Darcy DiNucci coined the term in her 1999 Print
magazine article titled “Fragmented Future.” Web 2.0 refers to interactive, collaborative and essentially social interpretations and applications
of Internet technology. This stands in contrast to Web 1.0 technology,
characterized by static web pages that envisioned a monodirectional
broadcasting kind of application of the net, emphasizing the individual
rather than the social.
Ten years before Facebook, the town of Blacksburg designed and
implemented a citywide social network—the first in the world. The
Blacksburg Electronic Village, as it was called, connected Blacksburg
residents online to “[foster] the virtual community that has been created to complement and enhance the physical community.” Very early,
Blacksburg demonstrated a vision of an Internet integrated with the
world rather than conceived as separate from it. It could have been
foreseen that Blacksburg would become a place where the digital and
physical worlds became more integrated, but sadly the reason that it did
fulfill that promise wasn’t Blacksburg’s early vision of a Web 2.0 world.
Absurdly, it was a random act of violence and a social network’s secretive policy change that brought the virtual and physical realms together
