Which, for the moment, they're not.

Computer technology is still brand-new, relatively speaking. We're so aware of how much has changed that we can't see how much hasn't.

Take this column, for example.

I am whacking away at a keyboard designed for a typewriter, playing on keys that are built to slow me down. My fingers dance as fast as they can, but my mind is way ahead of my fingers. When images emerge, instead of simply intending that they blossom on your monitor or in your mind, making them flow as fast as I think, all I can do is describe them in words. Our minds are constrained by this ancient tool, bent to its cramped dimensions.

They say that if all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Communication looks to me like words, like text to parse, and always will. So when I try to define the qualities of an interactive game or even a great film, I don't have the vocabulary. I lean heavily on words given to me by the study of philosophy and literature, when I was immersed in a canon that's been completely redefined.

I can see in my mind's eye something like luminous neurons emerging in this space we are creating by our digital interaction, linked by lines of light. But our tribe does not yet speak a common tongue so we can't say what it is. The most visionary among us look like miners crawling through a tunnel in a dark mountain, their little lamps illuminating a square foot of dirt.

On a long ride through a cold snowy landscape last weekend, I listened to tapes from the Teaching Company, a wonderful set of lectures by Stanford's Seth Lerer on the history of the English Language. Lerer recalled that when William Caxton brought the printing press to England in the 1470s, society changed over centuries, not overnight.

People wrote manuscripts by hand for at least 150 years and both written manuscripts and printed text co-existed. The first printed books were expensive, hardly meant for the masses. Their type fonts were designed to look like writing.

A new technology always tries to look like an old technology. The first "horseless carriages" had whip sockets in their dashboards, Lerer observed.

When the infantry was first mechanized, men continued to be posted near large artillery pieces, one hand raised in a fist. Long after cavalry officers gave up horses, those men had to stand there when the canon boomed, their empty hands holding the ghosts of a horse's reins so it wouldn't bolt.

Real computer literacy will extend far beyond our screens of scrolling text, dictation to a little mic, the evolution of book-like containers to hold our words ... beyond a mouse in our cramped fingers, clicking icons like hieroglyphics ... beyond images pasted on a flat panel display ... beyond dancing applets, clever animations, snippets of film.

When we live inside the space created by real computer literacy, the pixels on our screens will turn to flame.

Computers will be free, free at last to be real computers and won't have to pretend to be televisions or books. The generations immersed in that modular interactive world will experience multi-modal constructions of meaning and possibility, adaptable and plastic - right here, right now - with communication like balloons in comics that pop up in your mind as well as mine, the result of a nod or a wink, not a click. Seemingly instantaneous meanings happening in the matrix of spacetime, our conscious intentions like gravity wells, bending vectors of electromagnetic energy toward our nodal selves. And we will be inside.

Inside the rooms of a digital castle, its walls made of mist as we are, dreaming ourselves deep in the interior of a single mind.

We are not the first generation to be alienated from their own childhood memories, Lerer reminds us, estranged from what we once thought was "human nature," which we see now is simply the way we constructed identity and self in the context of prior technologies. The abrasion of the present against our evolving souls is the price of a digital future.

In 1490, William Caxton wrote that language had changed beyond recognition since he was a child, two generations earlier. Dialects evolving in the countryside forced people to choose the way they wanted to be human. They lived, Caxton said, in a variable world of transitory forms, including the structures of power.

Five hundred years later, compressed by digital technology, our world presses us against choices like that too. The Computer like the printing press inaugurated a contextual shift in how people wield power. To know that we can choose identities, choose how to be human ... that throws us for a loop. We too live in a variable world of transitory forms, our boundaries dissolving. We are old men old women clinging to tribal identities and gods carved in words as we wash out to sea in a tide of digital transformation.

A seachange, then and now. What does it mean to be "English?" asked Caxton like a newlywed trying on the strange word "husband." What does it mean to be ... "human?" And who will WE be, living inside those fluid powerful selves that extend themselves in immersive 3-D virtual collaboratory landscapes (our monitors, keyboards, and modems in museums) ... when poetry, art and dance are difficult to distinguish, and the evidence of the senses blurs ... when the electromagnetic spectrum visible to our modified eyes extends to unimaginable lengths ... and we realize that we don't write code, our code writes us, defining the extensible horizons of our conscious life.

But that will be then. This is now. And for now, there's nothing to do but bang away at these keys, waiting for more spacious bandwidth ... and click and send these little email bombs to explode with a flash and a bang and drift like acrid smoke in the night sky and disappear.

January 16 1999