Interesting discussion today on the potential of hypertext, as set out by Ted Nelson many decades ago… and how its capacity to represent a dynamic communication network isn’t quite being realised on the Web, despite the myriad advancements in technical invention over the years.

Conceptualisation and thus realisation of the technology (vis-à-vis that enduring form vs. content debate) seems like one very plausible reason.  Or to put it more simply, people are still stuck in the paradigm of linearity from print as the default communicative technology (…at least up until the 21st century).

Indeed, using text alone (via print) to express the full intricacies of a network and dynamic (or reciprocal) streams of communication between ‘nodes’ in the network doesn’t quite do it justice, I think … The network is a 3-dimensional beast which 2-D schematics go some of the way to helping visualise… but only some of the way.