My own researches into this have shown that where visitor numbers have increased it is because people have looked for museums to visit in a given area using the Internet, rather than because they have seen specific items they then want to see 'in the flesh'. That is, these are people who would visit museums anyway. And museums that have had websites for any length of time have tended to find that after an initial surge, the numbers level off.

Even more worrying are the assumptions that are made about education and the educational use of computers. Museums are fast becoming commodified - providing information to be downloaded. Whatever happened to all the work that museum educators have done over the last few decades to get rid of glass cases and to involve students directly with the material culture to be found in museums? Wouldn't those millions of pounds be better spent on employing more staff and making the real objects more readily available to students. Digitising them and confining them to a virtual existence is to remove 98% of that which makes their presence and hands-on work with them unique. This whole aspect of emotional contact, of exploration and self discovery that goes beyond looking at a picture and learning a few facts (and face it, most kids just download and stick it into a report) is lost with computer-mediated access.

We are also faced with the fact that what goes onto the Internet is fixed, just as text in a museum is fixed. Objects are taken out of context (even if a museum's entire collection is virtually available, you cannot wander round it as easily as you can in real space, making those serendipitous connections that are what help make education).

Even more serious than those and many other issues connected with the nature of education are the even more insidious cultural biases that have yet to be addressed. Computer hardware and software has grown out of the thinking of a tiny minority of people on the planet. Their metaphysic (which is linear, materialistic, analytical, and [they would have us believe] rational) is that of wealthy, white, young men. This view of the world is so basic to the idea of computers and the Internet that you cannot have the latter without the former. It is cultural imperialism on a huge scale. After all, it is difficult enough addressing the most vital issues of our time in conventional museums, but at least exhibitions can be arranged so that people meet and talk and are given the opportunity to experience the world in a way that is natural to others. These issues which largely concern our connection with the world are, in most respects, trans-rational, cyclical, spiritual and synthetic. They are the concerns of most people who live on the planet today. Where these two metaphysical stances collide is the point where most of the ecological, social and religious problems we face are born. If museums wish to be taken seriously in a cultural sense, we cannot shut out the very people we are supposed to be including - those for whom a computer model of the world simply does not accord with their vision of reality. And if we try, increasingly, to channel an inclusive view of things through an exclusive channel, we have nothing but trouble ahead.

I would like to add that I am not a technophobe. I spend all day at my machine. I worked on computerized cataloguing in the 1980s, have used them for administrative purposes and for desk top publishing. As someone whose disability confines him to his house, I find it indispensable. But unless we learn to look beyond the advertising hype of the computer companies and the glamour of a new technology, we will simply be erecting a new form of glass case in our museums and it will take decades to dismantle them.