Hanging under his balloons beside the honey tree, we aretold that Winnie the Pooh "could see the honey, he could smellthe honey, but he couldn't quite reach the honey." After anothernight hanging in cyberspace, I know how he feels.

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

Remember the claims made for AI a decade ago? Thespirit of Pappert's Mindstorms and the MIT lab made us dream ofrobots, ubiquitous by the end of the century, doing slave labor.Those dreams disappeared as the vaporware of AI vanished intothin air.

But wait a minute. Before we sneer at the predictors, lookat what AI is in fact doing. Every time another chip takes over adozen functions in my new car, it's invisible. Expert systems andneural nets don't do everything, but in the right domains, theydo more than we imagined. Every time there's another breakthroughin AI, it devolves into an "incremental change" in the tasks wehand over to computers. Ho hum: Another miracle made tame byintegration into what we already know.

The contextual shift promised by prophets of AI has in facthappened -- smart machines are everywhere -- and is now theground on which we stand. How quickly we forget.

Every revolutionary technology takes a long time to teach ushow to use it. The visionary "futurists" always miss the bigpicture. A bright man said when the telephone was invented, "Ican foresee the day when there will be a telephone in everycity."

Socrates feared that writing would destroy civilization. Howcan one evaluate the validity of an argument, he asked, unlessone is face to face with a known person? No one would rememberanything if everything is written down.

Similar objections were raised against the printing press inthe fifteenth century.Identical arguments are raised againstcomputers. In a way, they're right. Civilization as we know it iscoming to an end and something new is breaking out of a crackedegg.

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

You wouldn't know it, though, from much of the content of CDROMS and websites. The rush to stake out territory in cyberspacehas meant a lot of pretty pictures, some video clips that taketoo long to download, and little of the innovative content thatthe Net must now teach us patiently how to create. I'm sure thatsmart catalogs and talking billboards will not remain thenormative forms of the content of cyberspace.

No wonder I'm disappointed. I find hundreds of pop-upbooks on the WWW. Now, books are fine; I love books; but when I'mon the Web, I don't want books. I want creative interaction. Idon't want to dig through mountains of ore looking for a littlegold. I want to discover not only new content mediated by newforms but also new dimensions of my self as I interact with theNet in a symbiotic relationship that takes us both up the risingspiral of a self-conscious dialectic.

Maybe I'm jaded. My eyes have been trained by fractals,after all, cycling through millions of colors, kaleidoscopes ofunimaginable complexity. I want the same rush, the same insightinto the nature of things, when I click from site to sitesearching for wisdom.

It's a shame, really: if ever there's a natural fit, it'scyberspace and our hunger for growing our minds and training ourbrains. Our minds expand naturally into the shimmering non-spaceof the Net. The glowing screen seduces us into a night that neverends. I stay up way too late, following luminous breadcrumbsthrough the forest. But those breadcrumbs seldom make a fullmeal.

I need to be patient. Like written documents and printedbooks before it, the Net as it evolves will feed back to usreflexive knowledge about the journey itself. The Net willcontinue to become self-conscious and replicate fractalimages of infinite possibilities at higher and higher levels ofabstraction. Then we will encounter our hive brain in a way thatlets us recognize ourselves, included in something bigger that isat the same time reduced to symbols that enable us to see our newselves.

The content of the Net will ultimately be the content of ourtransformed selves rendered in symbolic form. The Net is a newkind of community. Every transformation of the Word increases ourdistance from one another and paradoxically makes available atthe same time the means for connecting with one another at deeperand more intimate levels.

So what is our task? To appreciate the enormity of thiscontextual shift through which we are living, to have the courageto think and imagine the genuinely new content that will enablethe Net to discover its potential, to be co-creators ex nihilo,from the nothingness that is sheer possibility, of the synthesisof sound, images, text, and motion that will define the virtualspaces we are building like modules of a space station.

There will continue to be plenty of garbage. Hucksters willcontinue to sell the menu as if it's the meal. Our job ascreatives and technicians is to fill that space nevertheless withthe heights and depths of ourselves as we discover and create theinterior landscapes of the virtual world.

Those breadcrumbs will expand into a full meal. We'll findwhat we're looking for an know it when we find it.

We will see the honey, smell the honey, and reach the honey.

November 1 1995