Opportunities from Hypertext

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= And so hypertext also offers us creative opportunities, from the simple relief from making arbitrary choices about sequence in presenting meanings that have no inherent sequencing, to new ways of creatively combining different genres within the same text, allowing each to do the kind of meaning-work it is best specialized to accomplish;

= Hypertexts also foreground many more scales, synoptically and dynamically, in the production and construal of meaning; they allow and encourage us, the facilitate making connections ACROSS scales (cf. meta-discourse) as well as within scales, thus boot-strapping the meaning potential for talk about talk;

= And finally, and to me most exciting, spatial hypertext systems like VIKI allow us to create topological meaning relations between texts, so that they can have fuzzy degree of membership in some set or some relation or even some structure; this can be done by the simple means of adjusting the distance between text icons to represent degree of relatedness, and this can be done in principle simultaneously for membership in different sets, and along more than one dimension of difference; VIKI actually includes a rudimentary spatial pattern parser that can recognize new ad hoc spatial arrangements that are repeated and coming to have significance for the user, and can codify these as templates, thus formalizing topological meaning into new typological meaning.