Hanging under his balloons beside the honey tree, Winnie the Pooh "could see the honey, he could smell the honey, but he couldn't quite reach the honey." After another night hanging in cyberspace, I know how he feels.

There has been such an explosion of possibility and promise on the Net that it's easy to become cynical about the content it often delivers. New technology always excites bigger dreams than can be realized -- at first.

Remember the claims made for Artificial Intelligence a decade ago? We dreamed of robots, ubiquitous by the end of the century, doing slave labor. Those dreams disappeared as the vaporware of AI vanished into thin air.

But wait a minute. Before we sneer at the predictors, look at what AI is in fact doing. Every time another chip takes over a dozen functions in my house or car, it's invisible. Expert systems and neural nets don't do everything, but they do more than we imagined. Every time there's another breakthrough in AI, it devolves into an "incremental change" in the tasks we hand over to computers. It becomes part of the background noise as we work on whatever is next.

The contextual shift promised by prophets of AI has in fact happened -- smart machines are everywhere -- and is now the ground on which we stand. That's why we don't see it.

Every revolutionary technology takes a long time to teach us how to use it. Visionary "futurists" always miss the big picture. One said when the telephone was invented, "I can foresee the day when there will be a telephone in every city."

Socrates feared that writing would destroy civilization. Similar objections were raised against the printing press in the fifteenth century. Identical arguments are raised against computers.

In a way, they're right. Civilization as we know it is coming to an end and something new is breaking out of a cracked egg.

Futurists can't help it, and neither can we. We don't know what we don't know and we can't see what we can't see. Bound by the constraints of how we've been taught to frame reality, the advent of revolutionary technologies can feel like the end of the world.

You wouldn't know it, though, from much of the content on websites. The rush to stake out territory in cyberspace has meant a lot of pretty pictures, some video clips that take too long to download, and little of the innovative content that the Net must now teach us patiently how to create. Smart catalogs and talking billboards will not remain the normative forms of the content of cyberspace.

I find hundreds of pop-up books on the WWW and dozens of spinning gizmos pretending to add value. Now, there's nothing wrong with books; I love books. Books are cheap and portable and still deliver meaningful content. But when I'm on the Web, I don't want books. I want a different kind of experience entirely.

Longinus said long ago that the purpose of literature was "to teach and to please." Things have not changed that much. People go to websites to learn and to play, but most of the learning still happens through the medium of text.

The promise of creative interaction on the Net has not yet been fulfilled. We can, however, see signs of at least two ways it will be fulfilled in the future.

The first is the creation of "space" that builds community. This is not as easy as it sounds. "Electric Minds," a niche overseen by on-line guru Howard Rheingold, is shutting down.

AOL provides an intermediate space, not as big as the Net itself, not as small as a niche community like Electric Minds. I have a hunch that's one reason it's still going while Electric Minds is not.

We have learned to interact through digital text that represents us online. We are just beginning to show up as avatars or images that embody various personas.

The other promise that must await greater bandwidth, faster audio and video with less latency, and creative genius to see how to use it is the simulation of interaction with Turing Bots of all sizes and shapes.

A Turing Bot is an artificial construct -- a personality, an agent, a digital being -- that simulates human interaction so well that it's hard to tell what species we're engaged with.

I want creative interaction with Turing Bots constructed of images and text that disclose new possibilities for acting or truths of the human condition that I can't put into words.

I don't want to dig through mountains of ore looking for a little gold. I want to discover not only new content mediated by new forms but also new dimensions of my self as I interact with the Net in a symbiotic relationship that takes us both up the rising spiral of a self-conscious dialectic.

Maybe I'm jaded. My eyes have been trained by fractals, after all, colorful kaleidoscopes of unimaginable complexity. I want the same rush, the same insight into the nature of things, when I click from site to site searching for wisdom.

If ever there's a natural fit, it's cyberspace and our hunger for growing our minds and training our brains. Our minds expand naturally into the shimmering non-space of the Net. The glowing screen seduces us into a night that never ends. I stay up way too late, following luminous breadcrumbs through the forest. But those breadcrumbs seldom make a full meal.

We need to be patient. Like written documents and printed books before it, the Net as it evolves will feed back to us reflexive knowledge about the journey itself. The Net will continue to become self-conscious and replicate fractal images of infinite possibilities at higher and higher levels of abstraction. Then we will encounter our hive brain in a way that lets us recognize ourselves, included in something bigger that is at the same time reduced to symbols that enable us to see or apprehend our new selves.

The content of the Net will ultimately be the content of our transformed selves rendered in symbolic form.

What is our task in the meantime? To appreciate the enormity of this contextual shift through which we are living, to have the courage to think and imagine the genuinely new content that will enable the Net to discover its potential, to be co-creators ex nihilo, from the nothingness that is sheer possibility, of the synthesis of sound, images, text, and motion that will define the virtual spaces we are building.