Am I the oldest woman on the web? Hardly, but I sure feel like it. Most of the men and women I work with are younger than my grown children. I'm older than all the career women who blast away at MarComm (Marketing and Communications for the uninitiated like me) and worrying about stock options and IPO's (Initial Public Offerings - when company stock gets sold to the public). Everyone hacking away in Silicon Valley wants to hit the "Big One" with an Internet stock that moves at orbital speeds.

Well, all this activity swirling around me doesn't phase me one bit. I've already wrestled with my own tigers in West Africa, crossed the Gobi Desert, narrowly avoided being blown to bits in Tiannemen Square, which I could never spell. And none of it matches the everyday excitement of working on the web and the Internet. My first cyber-thrill was uploading a whole magazine in twenty minutes on an early multimedia BBS here in San Francisco. Suddenly I was in touch with people all over the country who were interested in multimedia, virtually an unknown word at the time.

The next rush came a year later with the web. Suddenly we could upload magazines with formatting, pictures and visual effects. We guessed right away that sound was just around the corner. Today, just two and a half years later, we have full multimedia on the web.

So Grandma moves on to designing ways to put the web on your TV. Is this important? Is it necessary? You bet it is. Now the Internet audience is going to jump from 40 million to 400 million. No one is interested yet. But when Old Faithful, Bank of America, starts getting accounts signed up from Mali via TV and satellite, they'll be impressed. One of the web's greatest innovators, Bank of America will be right there on our TV's, leading the banking pack of America and Deutschland into our living rooms and checkbooks.

Meanwhile, Old Grandma, the oldest woman on the web, sits in her office and carefully repurposes properties from Hollywood film studios, studies Java so she can program on any platform (well, I mean hire someone to do that), builds new interface designs for still indescribable products, and investigates the do's and dont's of web banner advertising.

But is there a rub in this idyllic picture? You bet there is. Like all the decades of her life, Internet Grandma is an enigma to some and a threat to others. The enigma part is not difficult. Jackie Mason is an enigma to non-New Yorkers. Enigma has to do with geography and local culture. But the threat of Old Grandma has always been a mystery.

She has a strong personality. She has strong opinions. She is outspoken. But so are a lot of people. Strong opinions can be comforting when they are clear and one knows where the person stands. It's not the opinions. She's a threat even at work where she is an anomaly among the young. She has plenty of industry knowledge and problem solving skills. But these are helpful, not threatening.

Internet Grandma has been pondering this threatening question. In our business one is successful owning even 10% of the available information. If few of us even have that much, who can possibly be threatening?

What else about Grandma? Ah, this Grandma doesn't just work 12 hours a day on the Internet. She is also a painter and a writer. And a good one at that. In plain English she is creative - very creative. And here in the new world of CyberSpace, VERY CREATIVE is still a threatening thing to be.

Some creativity is tolerated or even rewarded in the work world and this includes the Internet industries. But to be really creative, we still have to make our own web sites or artistic creations in other media. The crux of creativity is that no one tells us what to do and this is the opposite behavior from working in a company where we can only do what we are told. When we are creative we don't have a purchase order to fill, an information architecture to create, a spec for a computer-based movie. We just make what we want on a blank screen, blank piece of paper, blank tape, blank film. Whatever it is, it's blank to start with and we create something on it.

The threatening part of creativity is that living the life of a creative person we are "doing what we want to do." This old grandma has learned that some people who cross my path are just plain "threatened" by me. As I look back on all these people, I finally understand that what must be threatening is that they have some unfinished, unseen, perhaps even unknown, creativity inside them. It might be hidden way down; it might be up near the surface. It might be set aside for a few years. It might be really invisible.

But I've learned that they have it. And when they look at me or listen to me talk, invisible alarms go off. They lose their balance; their middle ears don't work right. Something is wrong and they feel uncomfortable and I am the cause. It's as though I were screaming at them "You can do it; you can do it. Get out there and paint. Grab a microphone and sing. Take that computer and do what YOU want to do on it." But I am really just talking about some task we are performing for the job.

Meanwhile creativity is making its way into business journals and manuals these days along with holistic outlook, meditation, and a host of new techniques. I just heard about a poet who reads his poems aloud in corporations because poetry is 'feeling' and when people are 'feeling,' the new MBA gurus are saying, they will work better.

But we need to take a look at creativity.

For about three hundred years, creativity has been the province of a group of 'artist-priests' who made paintings, sculpture, books, and music, among other things. They were set aside from the general public. Prior to the Renaissance, artists were more like tradespeople or craftspeople.

Now in the late twentieth century the message has been published loud and clear. Creativity is no longer the province just of the artist-priests who hang out in artist bars and performance spaces and impromptu festivals in remote deserts. Creativity is something we are considering fostering in our children; allowing into the workplace; letting it show in all our lives.

Yes, the self-empowerment new age movement of the sixties has delivered us the right to our own creativity. We have heard about this right, this great pleasure, this unique talent of the human species to be creative. But we are probably not dealing with it yet. We probably are not ready for it to take over our lives, destroy our ability to make money, make us more passionate about work than about our homes and families. No, we're not ready yet to face all our fears about being creative and doing what we really want to do. Being creative might not mean making art. It might be being creative about a community, about a boat, about a farm. But it does always mean doing what we want to do.