Gardens, as Michel Foucault puts it, are "heterotopian projects". And as described in the previous chapters, the Living Garden is also an idea made up of various parts, but at its heart lie four conceptual walls - the first of these, built on an attempt to identify a social role for technology in society; the second, based on an exploration of how evolving computer technology and wireless `active' environments can be made to trigger `events' (both external and psychological); the third a critique - and parody - of multimedia as a technology and social phenomenon as it exists today. The purpose of the final wall is described in the closing paragraphs.

The Garden, then, provides the means to bring this range of ideas together within a framework, a skeleton that might be analysed, fleshed out - or chopped apart - in various ways in the future. The purpose of this book has been to provide the means to distill these various lines of enquiry into a coherent and accessible form and hopefully to seed the start of an interesting debate about uses of digital technology.

It will be clear that another of the reasons that the scheme is described as a `living' system is because messages (Living Books) are not treated as dead, isolated events, cold artefacts or commodities. Their function is to act as a trigger to set off a series of psychological processes. The multimedia event as integrated into a dynamic social world, rather than being a product in its own right. In a sense, these mental associations could be described as a kind of intellectual hypertext - a web of personal memories elicited and recalled through the messages delivered within a garden. The purpose of the Living Books is not to define content but to act as a vehicle which may carry meaning. A message is the seed from which meaning grows within the (metaphorical) garden of the self. So this is not a 'market garden', with a commercial value, as such, but a place which can bear a more mellow kind of fruitfulness.

It seems paradoxical, then, that the Internet - essentially the ARPAnet technology of the Cold War, designed to provide a command and control infrastructure in the US in the event of nuclear war - should lie at the heart of the Garden. But the evolution of ARPAnet into today's Internet is itself a very good example of how one technology (centered around digital packet switching) can be applied in very different ways. Is it any more fanciful to imagine the Internet undergoing a similar evolution to provide the backbone to a national (or international) chain of Living Gardens?

Indeed, such changes of use are nothing new. It is interesting to note that it was the military engineers of the 15th century, made redundant through peace in Europe, that spurred on the evolution of `natural' landscapes as they applied their skills in hydraulics, surveying, cartography, and mathematics to build environments for the sake of various forms of social engineering.

Today's Internet is often heralded as a means for democratising (or, yet again, empowering the individual) - true to an extent, provided you own or have access to £2000.00 worth of machinery, understand the vagaries of using your e-mail software and World-Wide Web browser, that you can read, that you can pay the £15.00 per month subscription to your Internet `service provider' and that you can comprehend and navigate the entire panoply. The Internet may ultimately allow you to vote in local elections, but only if you fulfil all the criteria above. The old, impoverished, illiterate or just the disinterested may find themselves very quickly disenfranchised. The free-at-the-point-of-use aspects of the Garden should simply emphasize how restricted is access today to the evolving technologies of communication.

The current shape of the Internet - like much multimedia technology - is also relevant as its claims to `empower' are based on `you too...!' promises: `you too can be a publisher, film director, writer, musician, whatever'. That by mimicking a process you somehow control it. The Living Garden makes use of similar technology to the Internet, not to ape commercial activities or publishing transactions (as though either activity somehow makes you `richer' as a person) but to provide and maintain a place for individual dialogue. The transaction is valuable because you think it is valuable, not because it can be sold to millions, or because arbiters of taste and aesthetics deem it fit to live and exist. An asset within the Living Garden is something whose value is defined by you, the individual.