For people who have one, the computer has already shown itself to be the great equalizer, the final flattener, making all of us the creator and the created. With every advance in technology, art and entertainment — its cuter, more popular sister — change in radical, unpredictable ways. And at each turn they become more democratic, more accessible. The printing press starts with Bibles and ends up with pulp fiction. Radio popularizes rock 'n' roll. TV spawns the sitcom. Now consider the possibilities that will open up as the computer meets the Net — not the network of today, with piddly, slow connections that are mainly good for relaying e-mail. But the Net of a hundred years from now, when media can move at the speed of light. Perhaps all the newfound interactivity will work on our brains in more salutary ways. This is your brain on TV. And this is your brain on "Very Distributed Storytelling," as one futuristic project is called at M.I.T.'s Media Lab. Any questions?

Plenty. Lots of people like just watching. The road to interactive entertainment has been rockier than a walk in a quarry, and with good reason. Who wants to cook when you can eat at a four-star restaurant? Entertainment should be...entertaining! Not work. And who wants to wade through all the awful stuff that's certain to crowd out the brilliance? Attempts at forging serious art from random accessibility have been interesting in an experimental way. But not accessible in a random kind of way. "There is no popular need right now for multimedia. That's obvious," sighs Michael Joyce, the father of hypertext fiction — nonlinear storytelling in which plot lines unfold in different ways upon subsequent readings. Joyce, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, wrote the "classic" hypertext novel, afternoon, a story. The piece is told one screenful of text at a time; by clicking on adjectives and verbs, readers veer off in far-flung narrative directions. While this may sound like the same experience as following hypertext links around the World Wide Web, afternoon was written in 1987 and distributed on floppy disks — well before the Web opened its portals.

Curiously, rather than being a boon to the nascent hypertext-fiction movement, the Web is seen as a spoiler: "The regrettable rump faction says we lost the hypertext movement when the Web came along," says Joyce. "No one knows yet how to make this a popular medium." Why? "The Web is all edges and without much depth, and for a writer that is trouble," he says. But Joyce, who nevertheless created his own Web-based novel, Twelve Blue, is not discouraged. He believes the forking paths of computer narrative will help some artist somewhere create a new medium that is truer to life than anything that's come before: "People have a complex sense of their own lives, which isn't often accounted for in popular art — they're capable of very complex relationships. New media have to be faulted — ironically! — for the failure to express that complexity."

Joyce believes, though, that the artistic failures that litter the cybserscape are good, a hopeful sign. Art, after all, is not produced easily or without struggle, even in the digital age. "We're very close to some shared moment, a transformative medium," he insists. In other words, something big is happening. We'll know it when we see it.

Senior writer Joshua Quittner is editor of TIME Daily, the online news service

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