Andover.Net Publishes Voices From the Hellmouth, Jon Katz' New Book Examining Geek Culture One Year After the Columbine Tragedy.

Business/Technology Editors

ACTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 20, 2000

Book Gives Voice to Teenagers Paying the Price for Being Different;

Demonstrates the Power of the Internet

To Give Kids Community and Voice

Andover.Net (NASDAQ: ANDN), the Internet's leading Linux and geekdom destination, announced that Slashdot will publish Jon Katz' new book Voices from the Hellmouth. Katz, author of the recent book Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho (Villard), explores the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings on the culture of what society has stereotyped as "geeks" -- those kids who by nature of intelligence, individualism or interest in games or computers are ostracized in high schools across the nation. The Columbine hysteria made life a nightmare for these kids, and drove the cost of being "different" way up.

In Voices from the Hellmouth Katz lets the kids tell their own tale through the power of the Internet. After the Columbine High School shootings, Katz wrote a series of articles on geeks and the aftereffects of Columbine. Published in the uber-geek website Slashdot, the series generated thousands of responses from kids everywhere, and their outcries are the essence of the powerful new Voices from the Hellmouth. These columns were entered into the Congressional Record, linked to and reprinted on websites and mailing lists all over the world, and examined by national media such as the New York Times.

Voices from the Hellmouth is a sensitive and brutally truthful account of the pain and alienation teenagers go through when deemed "different" by their high school classmates. In their own voices, geeks, nerds, goths, videogame addicts and gamers told of peer ridicule and Geek Profiling from teachers and parents. "For a writer, there's nothing more humbling than to be at a loss for words. I can't possibly do more justice to some of these kids than to let them speak for themselves," writes Katz.

"People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds and dorks. The lucky ones are excluded; the unfortunate ones are harassed, humiliated and sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values -- unthinking school spirit, proms and jocks -- are exalted, while the best values -- freethinking, non-conformity and curiosity -- are ridiculed," writes Katz. "Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just about feeling unhappy, it was to be dangerous."

Voices from the Hellmouth is published by Andover.Net, and can be ordered online at www.thinkgeek.com. Suggested retail price is $14.95. Author Jon Katz is receiving no monetary remuneration for Voices from the Hellmouth. Introduction by Jeff "Hemos" Bates, cofounder of Slashdot, and preface by Henry Jenkins, MIT Media Studies Professor. Professor Jenkins is a renowned authority on child violence who testified in front of Congress on the Columbine shootings.

About the Author

Jon Katz is the author of Running to the Mountain and Virtuous Reality, as well as six novels. He has written for Wired, New York, GQ, Hotwired and The New York Times and was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for articles in Rolling Stone. He also writes on the Web for Slashdot.org. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Paula Span. He can be e-mailed at [e-mail]. He can also be reached via ICQ: 18891303 and AIM ID: Quasimodem47.

Note to reporters and book review editors: Please contact Chris Stamm at [phone], or [e-mail] for a free copy of Voices from the Hellmouth.

More About Voices from the Hellmouth

By Jon Katz

The Columbine High School massacres in the spring of l999 triggered a national hysteria over that tragedy and the reasons behind the spate of horrific school shootings in America in recent years.

In their frenzied search for a scapegoat to appease understandably panicked parents, many educators, journalists and politicians settled on a simple answer: the Net. The Columbine killers, police said, were avid computer geeks and games, and even had their own website. A national poll commissioned by the Washington Post found that 82 per cent of all Americans believed the Internet was all or partly responsible for the Littleton killings.

It seemed in the weeks and months after the killing that America's schools went to war against the non-normal: geeks, Goths, nerds, oddballs, the alienated, individualistic and different. The price of being different went up. No longer was it enough for non-conformists to be harassed and isolated. Suddenly, they had become potential killers as well.

Kids who wore black clothes, white make-up, spent too many hours online, or who played "violent" computer games were suspended, sent home, forced into counseling. Kids who wrote truthfully about their unhappiness in school were sent to special classes or, in some cases, exiled to special institutions.

This war against some of America's most creative and interesting kids continues to this day. If anything, it's gotten worse. In North Carolina this year, a task force recommended that the state fund the setting up of an anonymous toll-free phone line so that classmates could turn in peers they thought were dangerous or violent.

Hysterias have broken out before in America, from Salem to the McCarthy years. But they were before the World Wide Web. In the weeks and days after the Columbine killings, Jon Katz, a columnist for Slashdot.org began writing a series of columns about the response to the tragedy called "Voices From The Hellmouth."

Slashdot invited kids in schools to speak for themselves about what was happening. And they did. Thousands of these scape-goated kids found they suddenly had a powerful new medium through which to tell their stories. They changed for all time the powerlessness of kids who are "different" and the context in which they are seen by the rest of the world.

The stories from the Hellmouth were reprinted and linked to from sites all over the world and were cited by newspapers, TV networks and other media, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Charlotte Observer, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle and ABC and NBC News. While they failed to stem the hysteria, they offered a powerful antidote for those who were willing to listen. The Hellmouth series marked perhaps the first time in American life that the young were able to be heard in this way.

"Voices From The Hellmouth" is a collection of their stories.

About Andover.Net

Andover.Net (NASDAQ: ANDN) is the leading Linux destination on the Internet. Serving 50 million page impressions to over 2.4 million users each month, Andover.Net (www.andover.net) includes the largest news/community site, Slashdot (slashdot.org); the largest site for programmer resources, Freshmeat.net (www.freshmeat.net); and the popular developer e-commerce site, ThinkGeek (thinkgeek.com). With these sites and our other Linux sites such as FreeCode (freecode.com) and LinuxDaveCentral (www.linux.davecentral.com), Andover.Net accounts for over 50% of the visits to Linux destinations on the Internet. Andover.Net also includes cross-platform sites such as MediaBuilder (www.mediabuilder.com) that provide programmer and developer resources for users of many popular operating systems in addition to Linux such as Windows, UNIX and Macintosh.

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