Shape Shifting

In today’s symposium Adrian said: “If everything is equally distanced apart it doesn’t have a shape”. Unlike a book with consecutive pages, an extensive network of nodes connected by hypertext have no shape at all because not one node takes priority over another, they are all on a level playing field.

This concept is interesting and lends itself well to Douglas’s idea about interactive reading. The internet allows readers to choose where she/he wants to go while the story still makes sense, but if a reader of a novel were to dive straight into the middle of a book the chances are the story would not make sense at all.

I think we can attempt to create shapes for things that are shapeless. Take life for example, it doesn’t have a shape, but we write books, draw graphs, take photos etc, to give it some kind of tangibility, and all so we can make sense of it. Things with a shape are things we understand.

So where does this leave the internet?

It might be possible that hypertext is paving the way to understanding things that are shapeless. Perhaps as revolutionary as understanding a world that is round and not flat.