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I have seen the future,'' says James Gleick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning technology writer, ''and it's still in the future.'' Gleick echoes a small but growing sentiment among those at the forefront of the digital frontier, and that sentiment is frustration. Multimedia is a developing industry, but few people seem willing to admit just how much developing it needs. Like a country that has risen from Third World status to world power overnight, multimedia is bypassing that critical stage when such particulars as standards, guidelines, and conventions are established.
Imagine if the other media covered in this magazine (movies, video, books, music, and television) were bedeviled by the inconveniences of the digital revolution.
-- You go to a movie. Ten minutes into the film, the projector dies. ''Focus!'' screams the audience. A few minutes later the projectionist appears and says sheepishly that he has the wrong kind of sound card for this film. ''Could someone come up and take a look at it?'' he asks...
The well-documented technical complaints about Disney's The Lion King last Christmas are all too familiar to CD-ROM users. Currently, one must master a computer's technical complexities just to sample some of the wonders of interactivity, an absurd demand for a mass medium. This brings to mind the early auto industry, when drivers also had to be mechanics. A truly interactive future will be out of reach until we can run a program without having to tinker under the hood.
-- The video store has a huge poster in the window for next month's hot new release. 'Order Now!' it urges. You place your order and are promised the tape will be in next Friday. On Friday you're told that the release has been delayed a week. Next week you're told it'll be a month. One month turns into two...
Shipping schedules and distribution channels are not glamorous entertainment topics, which is why nobody talks about them. They're simply givens. But multimedia's infrastructure isn't yet firmly entrenched. Shipping dates for CD-ROMs are fluid; programs can arrive in stores months, even years, late. Virgin Interactive's highly anticipated The 11th Hour: The Sequel to the 7th Guest reportedly was going to hit the shelves early last year. More than a year later, the eleventh hour has come and gone -- and still no product is in sight. The inadvertent message: This is a minor-league industry, one that can't keep its promises.
-- You need to find a book about ancient Rome. At the store, you're faced with a selection that could fill the Colosseum. Narrowing your search for works on classical history helps only slightly. And on closer examination, you see that every book has the same cover. Maybe you should just close your eyes and pluck one...
Much has been made of the democratic nature of the Internet. In the future, everyone's voice will be heard. Problem is, right now everyone's voice can be heard. There's no filtering system, no quality control. ''With everyone able to upload their works to the network,'' writes computer security expert Clifford Stoll in his new book, Silicon Snake Oil, ''the Internet begins to resemble publishers' slush piles. It's up to the reader to separate out the dregs.''
