At first, Web shrines seem an improbable phenomenon. Web sites are notoriously transient, too, while we normally expect memorials to aspire to permanence. A selection of web shrines brought to our attention by HypertextNow readers and the editorial staff at Eastgate Systems. The earliest mention of a cyberspace shrine with which I am familiar is The Finn's shrine in William Gibson's 1988 novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive . To be fair, this isn't really a shrine in our sense, but rather a cybernetic simulacrum of a dead hacker.
Web shrines defy categorization and resist genre.
Here we find awards to commemorate a career, recipes to aid remembrance, memoirs real and imagined, prose and poetry and political polemic. We find shrines tended by sons and daughters, by grieving parents, by academic institutions, by an army medic who cannot forget the ravaged body of a child whose name she never learned. No How To guides instruct shrine builders. Absent experts and marketeers, we have myriad diverse sites, each crafted by an intimately personal vision for this most impersonal of media, each an intimately personal vision somehow captured in this most impersonal of media. As these shrines remind us, artists will use whatever tools they possess, however improbable the medium may seem to the message.