What something is revealed to be, what it means, depends on the horizon of possibilities (actions, inferences, things it might have been or done, etc.) within which it stands in contrasts. Explicit hypertext links are part of that standing within the horizon, but the items a text chunk, or a region of a place, are linked to stand close by, surrounded by a farther horizon. We can distinguish a variety of horizons for a thing, for a text, for a hypertext, for a suburban building, or for part of any place:

• items the thing or place or textual fragment is linked to explicitly (the factory in the next town, the head bank, the vacation home, other parts of a machine, matching items (tables with chairs), grammarical connections, explicit textual references, and so on.)

• the horizon visible behind these closely linked items. In places this is still mostly the result of design

• "farther out": the phenomenological horizon that is not a visible object linked to, not a visible object since it is composed of absences linked by rules of possibility

• the wilder possibilities that are on that horizon but not according to rules, that break or bend or defy rules

• nearby adjacencies, not themselves necessarily designed for contrast but standing in contrasts that will influence meaning and affect function

• the space of possible routes toward the horizon: other ways of reading the text or acting in the space, either according to the rules or running against them

• the contour of meaning surrounding this text or this place or this action, as a relatively definite perspectival construct out of surrounding possibilities.

Index
parallel and not

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001