Nerd that I am, I've always had a fondness for collections of information. In my youth, these were libraries, encyclopedia, reference books of all types, newspaper morgues, and elderly folk whose major occupation was passing on the lessons of life to the latest crop of "young 'uns".

Information was neat. Gathering information was a constructive, positive thing. "Look it up" brought memories of Autumn sunlight slanting on the page and the peace and quiet of a book lined reading room.

But, that changed......

Somewhere along the line, some smarty pants in New Mexico started selling a "personal computer" electronics kit through the mail, a couple of gawky teens from the Pacific Northwest dropped out of Harvard business school to write programming tools for it, big companies jumped on the bandwagon and everybody from The Two Steves to that National Cash Register spin-off, International Business Machines, began building and selling "beige boxes what don't work", and a compact little techno-junkie wrote a book about the near future where all information was digital and everybody had a computer hooked up to this big omnipotent "CyberSpace".

Oooooooohhhhhhhh.........

Somehow, Gibson's imagery in Neuromancer captured the fancy of practically every codehead involved in designing future generations of "beige boxes what don't work". "CyberSpace" became as much a part of our slanguage as "Dave? Dave's not here!"

The rise of the Internet seemed to validate Gibson's predictions. He called Cyberspace a "consensual illusion" and that's what it became. It seemed that everyone shared the same general vision of Cyberspace, a neon bright film noir Ridley Scott-esque stylized urban cluster. Sort of Downtown Tokyo meets Las Vegas as staged by Universal Studios Florida. Gibson's first Cyberspace film,Johnny Mnemonic, really captured the popular look of Cyberspace: dark and a little dangerous.

Somehow, I have a problem with equating the concepts "repository of knowledge" and "dark and a little dangerous". Fear of Learning may be a mark of American society in the opening days of the Third Milleneum but I still have to do my little part to bring back the fifties sitcom fantasies where everybody lived in a little bungalow with a white picket fence and the kids studied hard to get into good schools and be somebody. So, my animation company, 4U2C, is not located in the dark and dreary consensual illusion of Cyberspace but a short commuter train ride out in the Cyburbs. The kinda place where you expect to see Ricky and Fred, Lucy and Ethel, and Betty and Blondie hanging over the backfences exchanging gossip.

Cyburbia is that kinder gentler area of the virtual community that hovers a few miles out from Cyberspace. Here's where you find a lot of home businesses run by folks who appreciate yardwork. Here's where the kids can browse all day without encountering so much as a turgid nipple. Here's where you find the good old Home Town America ethos alive and well.