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Every so often I get a creepy feeling that I'm going to come to work one day and the Internet will have disappeared. I'll sit down at my desk, re up my computer, and be greeted with this on-screen message: ''Sorry. The future thing didn't work out. What were we thinking, anyway?'' And it won't be just the Net, but CD-ROMs, E-mail, interactive movies, web pages, even the far-out stuff like two-way TV and fully immersing virtual-reality bodysuits. All of it, gone. As quickly as it showed up. Some of you would like that, wouldn't you? No need to worry about being left behind by the technowave. You wouldn't have to become a geek and breathe through your mouth. No more games, no more acronyms. No future for you, as Johnny Rotten once said. Except that you're out of luck, because every day I come to work and the damn thing's bigger. Some numbers to throw around: *According to InfoTech, a Vermont-based research rm, there were 743,988 CD- ROM players in North America in Entertainment Weekly's birth year of 1990. In 1994, there were an estimated 13,227,772. And the number is expected to nearly double again by next year. *In 1990, there were 91 consumer CD-ROM titles, InfoTech reports. By 1994's end, there were an estimated 1,383. *In 1990, there were 1.7 million subscribers to the top ve on-line services (Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, Delphi, and GEnie), according to SIMBA Information. In 1994, there were 5.58 million. *The World Wide Web, meanwhile, is like that 30-acre fungus they found in Michigan: It wasn't there and then it was everywhere. Amateur tabulator Matthew Gray (Internet address: http://www.netgen.com/info/growth.html) has tracked the Web from a mere 130 Internet sites in June '93 to more than 12,000 sites by the end of 1994. Gray gures there are 50 to 100 new servers added every day. In other words, in the ve years since EW launched, something new has been lurching to its feet in the background, taking big Baby Huey steps. When this something new started to impinge upon the world of entertainment-around the time that Brian Keith started showing up on CD-ROMs-we gured we'd better cover it. Unfortunately, writing about new media recalls the old gag about the blind men feeling the elephant: The parts are radically dissimilar, and no one has an inkling as to what the larger beast will look like. But if it's our wrong calls you want, you'll have to come back for the 10th-anniversary issue. Maybe by then CD-ROMs will have faded in the face of interactive TV (doubtful). Maybe we'll all watch movies on disc instead of tape (possible). Maybe the commercial on-line services will have morphed into gateways to the larger Internet (probable). Maybe you'll be able to order Franklin Mint products over the Web (hell yes). And maybe we'll have a new way of sharing human experience, in addition to the movies and books and music and TV shows that make up the rest of this magazine. Right now multimedia means shiny machinery, and some people fetishize that machinery to the point at which others feel put off. That will end when compelling experiences start coming through the machinery-not games but stories-and we start to sense what the elephant really looks like. For now, we're grasping at air, but the air is charged.
