Chesterton in 1904 has a cautionary tale for those who wish to predict the future. The sheer abundance, diversity and originality of predictions in 1904 make it seem impossible for all of them to be wrong, but all of them do turn
out to be wrong. The mistake which the futurologists had been making was that they took isolated events that were going on in their time, and extrapolated from there to extraordinary futures. The sole thing that they failed to predict was that the future would be very like the present. Only more dull. Despite Chesterton's critique, the business of futurology is very much alive today and is still based on extremes. One particularly persuasive current format is the foretelling of strange new futures based around the advent and widespread use of computer-based communication, with Negroponte (1995) and Gates (1996) among the most prominent in a legion of futurologists. To date, far more effort has been expended on predicting the revolutionary futures of the Internet than has been put into ®nding out in detail how it is being used and the ways in which it is being incorporated into people's daily lives. This book is a contribution to the ongoing debate about the signi®- cance of recent developments in communications technologies. In the book I develop a methodology for investigating the Internet in order to conduct an empirically based exploration of its current uses. The focus in this book is on Finding out what the players of `Cheat the Prophet' are up to this time: a task for which an ethnographic methodology is ideally suited.