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The ability to navigate inside a space means that both the creator and the visitor can access context and explore related ideas easier than, for example, when reading a chronological feed, where ideas are isolated sentences piling up in an infinite stream of unrelated expressions (or, often, reactions). The value of footnotes, annotations, and other forms of parallel text is largely ignored by feed-based platforms for the sake of efficiency and simplicity, but to the detriment of the quality of content and context.

Spaciality and placeness in the virtual

The linguistic sign, according to Saussure, is pure form, arbitrary in its essence. Through language, the shapeless cloud of thought becomes coded into this form, creating an order of intelligible signs, thus conveying meaning.

An analogy can be made with the flow of information, although already coded into language, becoming intelligible through the interfaces we use to organise it. An interface, like the linguistic sign, suggests form onto which data is coded. It's structure shapes the way we make sense of a given set of information.

The interface is a language
Re-Framing is social change
Re-Framing is social change
Knowledge networks, rhizomes
Knowledge networks, rhizomes

Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other. There is no reason why concepts should cohere. As fragmentary totalities, concepts are not even the pieces of a puzzle, for their irregular contours do not correspond to each other. They do form a wall, but it is a dry-stone wall, and everything holds together only along diverging lines. (Deleuze & Guattari)

Making meaning is thus a retroactive suture requiring two puncture points; meaning does not simply issue linearly from the act of speaking or writing. The quilting point is a knot that holds and fixes the flux of signification.

"Every other point can be connected with every other point, and, where the connections are not yet designed, they are, however conceivable and designable" (Umberto Eco, p.81)

Finally they would be free of the constraints of one-page-in-front-of-the-other. They could concentrate on narrative rather than the order in which it was presented.

Exploring the Internet
Exploring the Internet
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"We must once again become a community of common access to a shared heritage."

– Ted Nelson, Dream Machines