"I have seen the future," says James Gleick, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer on technology, "and it's still in the future." Gleick gives voice to a growing sentiment among those on 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 (movies, television, books and music) were bedeviled by the inconveniences of the digital revolution.

You go to a movie. Ten minutes into the film, the audio dies. The projectionist appears and tells the audience he has the wrong kind of sound card for this film. "Could someone come up and take a look at it?" he asks...

Purchasers of Disney's The Lion King CD-ROM were similarly frustrated last Christmas when they couldn't get it to run on their computers. The video froze midframe, and the sound failed, bewildering users without the state-of-the-art equipment the program apparently required. Do you have to master a computer's technical complexities just to sample some of the wonders of interactivity?

The video store has a huge, alluring 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 the release has been delayed a week. The following 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 deadline is long past--and still no product is in sight. The inadvertent message: this is a minor-league industry, one that can't keep its promises.

A friend just got the new Pearl Jam album. It sounds great when you hear it in his room. But when you slip the disc into your CD player, you get nothing but static. You try your dad's system--still nothing. Maybe your portable Discman?

The battle to establish a standard interactive-CD format is already one of the messiest in entertainment history. Currently, if you want to buy CD-ROM games for your brother, you must make sure you buy the right versions. Among the possibilities: PC CD-ROM, Mac CD-ROM, CD-i, 3DO and Sega CD. And it's only going to get worse, as at least three new formats will be introduced this year. This is a consumer's nightmare: Beta vs. VHS all over again. About the only thing clear is that many people are not likely to commit to interactive entertainment until this issue is resolved.

TV...

What's on TV tonight? Click. After two minutes a rerun appears onscreen. You switch to a different channel. Another few minutes pass. Oh, no, opera. You try MTV. Several minutes later, a message pops up: UNABLE TO CONTACT HOST. Sigh. You need a faster

While paying for a CD-ROM that doesn't work is profoundly annoying, trying to get information and entertainment from the Internet can be equally irritating. Sure, the Net is interactive and compelling. But it's also slow. Although the phone companies talk about "increasing the bandwidth" to accommodate the flood of info headed to homes, it will be years before we'll be able to zap through the Net with the speed of a TV remote control.

You need to find a book on ancient Rome. At the store you're faced with a selection that could fill the Colosseum. Narrowing your search to 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."

--From Entertainment Weekly