On the waterfront, teen-agers congregate in the plaza of the New Metropolis, a year-old interactive technology museum. There are public Internet kiosks on the city streets. In Amsterdam, using new media is more social. Whether you're E-mailing, Web surfing or playing computer games, in the office or at home, you're usually doing it alone. In America, new media tend to be a private affair. This place seemed so sociable! Why, my friend wondered, couldn't new media in America be more like this - ''so out in the open, so. My friend and I half-smiled in embarrassment we were thinking of the nerdy, unpleasant cybercafes we knew in New York, full of taciturn patrons huddled over their screens. The computers were almost invisible, their screens built unobtrusively into the table's slanting wooden face.

Inside, under a 20-foot vaulted ceiling, people chatted and sipped koffie verkeerd (cafe au lait, Dutch style), waiting for a space at a long table with a peaked ridge down the center. Tables and wicker chairs spilled out of the fortress's broad gate a white-aproned waiter circulated with fat glasses of Duvel beer. She led us across a wide cobblestone square toward the Waag, a late-medieval brick fortress studded with circular turrets. We needed a place to check our E-mail, and our Dutch hostess offered to take us to the nearest cybercafe. LAST spring, I was in Amsterdam with a new-media artist friend.

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