The first two weeks in a new culture are so profoundly impactful, Margaret Mead told her friend Ralph Blum, the author of "Runes," that you have to stay in that culture another full year to learn anything more.

Our first two weeks in the digital world are almost up.

Have you noticed how the excitement has faded, how normal it feels to exchange email, to live anywhere and work everywhere, to know that the virtual rooms we inhabit comfortably might grow larger or have better furniture or nicer pictures on the walls, but will have nevertheless essentially the same feel?

Back in our apple days, when we were green and being blown away by every new application, I remember waiting anxiously for a new game from Infocom because it disclosed a whole new world. A few weeks ago, chatting with one of the producers from Jellyvision, the company that brought us 'You Don't Know Jack,' I realized that the sound effects and clever interactive text of the game show were direct descendants of those old games, rather than something altogether new.

This week I listened to Abby Cohen, prognosticator of prognosticators, speak of the United States as a "supertanker economy," dependable and immense. She gave examples of American companies that no other country can match: Disney in entertainment, Intel in chips, Microsoft in software.

Those three companies are building a virtual world, a framework for designed experience that we inhabit -- near the end of our first two weeks -- without even noticing.

The theme parks of Las Vegas, animated landscapes inside our heads, the transformation of "real life" into touristic space -- it's all of a piece. All skin on the scaffolding of a virtual world.

Tourism, for example. Tourists used to visit a foreign country and live in it while they were there. Then the natives put up signs and markers that defined "touristic space" as art galleries, museums, certain restaurants and parks. Books and brochures to guide us through those spaces were a virtual map, telling us what was interesting and safe for us to see.

That grew boring. Tourists wanted an experience of "real life" lived by the natives. So tours of factories and farms were added to the mix -- but they weren't "real" factories. The factory was a simulation of a factory, and tourists moved through it on conveyor belts. Behind the appearance of a factory, a real factory still happened, but the workers in it took a step back from the touristic space they propped up from behind like a Potempkin village. As when we stay with a local family and they put on company manners until we're gone.

When I lived on Maui, I noticed that tourists loved to attend luaus at which real Hawaiians danced. The people on Maui, however, are mostly Korean, Filipino, and Japanese, followed by "haoles" (ghostly pale people) and various kinds of other Asians, Pacific islanders, even a few Hawaiians. The hula is often danced by recent arrivals from Manilla.

To know the real Hawaii, you have to stay ... and stay. There are successive barriers defined by time, and on the other side of each, locals waiting to welcome you into a deeper experience of what it really means to live on a multi-racial island devoted to simulating itself.

We are tourists in our own territories, accessing our lives through simulations designed like drugs or high fashion to be wrap-around immersive virtual worlds that feel so real we forget they're invented.

The symbols with which we manipulate our constructions of reality point increasingly to other symbols. It is no longer a case of remembering that the finger pointing toward the moon is not the moon, but that the finger is pointing toward another finger that is pointing toward another finger ... and we call that recursive experience ... the moon.

Disneyland is a prototype of a designed environment from which realities like telephone poles are intentionally filtered. So too with Disneyland religion. The truths of our lives are filtered out as we enact pageants or tell stories that provide a vicarious experience of transformation. It's like drinking from a dribble glass, but we wonder why we're wet ... and still thirsty.

The points of reference of much of our experience are movies, television, multimedia, the virtual world of computer networks ... designed contexts and therefore contents in which we increasingly live and move and have our being.

I stood one day with my wife on the beautiful beach in front of our Hawaiian home. The palm fronds blew in the sea breeze, but I was unhappy about something, and I opened a Kauai guidebook to a picture of Hanalei Bay. "Look!" I said, "at that beautiful beach. THAT would be a great place to visit."

My wife laughed and said, Look: at the blue and blue of sky and sea, whitecaps breaking over the reef, the clouds over Lanai across the water. I had to laugh too. The beach in the picture was an image of peace and contentment, an archetypal image of paradise and a magnet for my yearning -- the same yearning that lured tourists to the beach on which I stood in their own elusive search for peace.

The virtual world is an image of a beach onto which we project ourselves. We are like people searching frantically for their glasses while wearing them. We're really in search of ourselves, and to find ourselves we must simply look up from that image of a beach to the bright sky and feel the salt spray, the hot sand, the velvet caress of the tropical air.

The digital world is a landscape painted from a palette of a million pastel colors, a Big Toy made not of plastic but of simulated plastic. Under its red and blue balloon-like skin is a sky the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

I guess I'm suggesting that -- now and again -- we take more than a vacation and turn that television off.