Feature:Hamlet In Cyberspace

Techno-blabber aside, media is more and more about two groups of people -- those at home with a keyboard, joystick and mouse, and those who aren't. An MIT professor looks at what the little devils are up to. Forget the blockheads crowing about the end of civilization and culture. On the Net, kids are redefining what creativity and culture are.

When you cut through all the hype, techno-blabber and posturing, media is really defined now by two groups of people - those at ease with a mouse, joystick and keyboard, and those who aren't.

The latter group is more likely to see this new machinery as tools for amusement - distracting, de-civilizing. Janet Murray, senior research scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT, says otherwise, having written one of the best and most important books about computing's impact on creativity, "Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press)."

Murray's book makes it clear just how important it is for the young to have more, not less, access to the Internet, and what astonishingly creative things sometimes happen when they do.

For many in their 30's or younger, the technology and equipment of the Net are not only part of their lives, but of their neural systems. Others may use technology to do business, e-mail friends, or access information on the Net or the Web, but only the young do so almost intuitively, having grown up incorporating this machinery into their physical beings and developmental consciousness.

As a general rule, their elders have not been happy with the computer revolution. The grown-ups often approach computers with an ingrained reserve and sometimes anxious dread. However willing determined, they are entering a world they have to learn to navigate, and may never be completely natural or intuitive for them.

Except for the poorest kids, however, the young have led interactive lives, almost from the time they could sit. They've grown up on sophisticated TV zappers; Sega and Nintendo systems; multiple CD players; intensely animated and graphically enhanced movies and series like "Star Wars" "Star Trek" or "Jurassic Park"; games like Zoom, Unreal, Mortal Kombat and the Legend of Zelda, and then computers and new kinds of software: BBS's, the Net and the Web, MP3's, ICQ, Hotline, Half Life. Even for veteran Webheads, it's tough to keep up. For latecomers, it's almost impossible. This creates an enormous cultural divide, a widening gap in the way different people perceive the same culture.

And since it is older people who dominate politics, run most newspaper articles, produce most television shows, preach from pulpits and plan school curricula, this profoundly creative new technology has been labeled dangerous almost from the beginning.

Society sometimes seems to have declared war on its own offspring, branding them as dumb, wanton, prone to addiction and social dislocation, demanding and deploying a growing array of blocking and control devices to protect them from their burgeoning new culture- V-Chips, blocking systems, ratings.

Janet Murray, like author Sherry Turkle before her, is fascinated by the notion that computers are sometimes an extension of our own consciousness, capturing our words on the keyboard and displaying or sending them almost as rapidly as we can think them. MUDers and newsgroup subscribers can comfortably project their deepest desires and emotions to people they know only as words on a screen. People can fall in love in moments online. Or get mad.

The psychology of flaming could fill several books. No other medium has ever allowed people to express their anger so reflexively, so easily, and with so few consequences. (Flaming is one of the Internet's unique freedoms and more interesting forms of expression, a predominantly adolescent male rite of passage, ritualistic, almost always public, antagonistic towards ideas, people or opinions that seem impersonal, earnest, preachy or remote).

Digital art, writes Murray, has already reached the same levels of complexity and expressiveness as traditional pictures and paintings hanging on museum walls. "All the major representational formats of the previous five thousands years of human history have now been translated into digital form," she writes. "There is nothing that human beings have created that cannot be represented in this protean environment, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to real-time photographs of Jupiter, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Shakespeare's First Folio, from walk-through models of Greek temples to Edison's first movies."

In creative terms, cyberspace is becoming more creative and inventive by the minute, Murray found, and has already generated new forms of narrative entertainment, with layered, sometimes three-dimensional, multiform stories -- from the blast-away videogames to the virtual dungeons of role playing games to postmodern and literary hypertext.

The geeks are not destroying creativity, her research makes clear; they are re-inventing and re-invigorating it. As digital narrative develops into maturity, Murray writes, the combat games will be joined by more complex creative processes. Participants will assume clearer roles; they'll learn how to become "orienteers" in complex labyrinths and to see the interpretative shaping of simulated worlds. All the while, digital writers will be learning which patterns of human experience can best be captured in digital media. New narrative art will come into its own.

Murray demonstrates in "Hamlet On the Holodeck" what an intellectual actually is - someone who doesn't run from something new and strange, but who helps us understand it.

If anything in the world is tougher to predict than the future of software, it's the future of art and culture. In the time since Murray began researching her book, virtual messaging and communications, digital art and graphic animation have mushroomed all over the Internet.

The computer, she writes, is chameleonic. It can be seen as a theater, town hall, an unraveling book, an animated wonderland, a sports arena, even a potential life form.

"As the most powerful representational medium yet invented," she writes, "it should be put to the highest tasks of society. Whether or not we will one day be rewarded with the arrival of the cyberbard, we should hasten to place this new compositional tool as firmly as possible in the hands of the storytellers."

"Hamlet On The Holodeck" is great ammunition to keep at hand when the next Luddite comes by or the next local newscast runs some witless story about the dangers of kids going online. The book imagines a future digital medium, one shaped by the hacker's spirit, the enduring power of imagination and the worthy, even noble passion the young - especially children -- are bringing to it.

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