Time, or the passage of time, is a great mediator. With time we grow and change. Time gives us perspective - some might even call it wisdom, though more often than not it's simply hindsight. With time we forget. Time is, of course, an additional dimension, and by its very nature it contains the ability to allow things to develop.

Over the three and a half years that the Boidem has grown and taken shape I have become increasing aware that a significant middle ground has taken shape precisely because of the fact that the Boidem is conceived as a continuing project. Most self-consciously hypertextual projects that I have seen are self-enclosed, singular and stand-alone. They present themselves as examples of how hypertext should work, yet they remain little more than examples, rather than real proof of how the idea works in real life. On the other hand (I'm not sure it should be called an extreme) we have informative writing that seeks to be informative without any purposefully reflective use of hypertext. As the Boidem developed I found myself presenting it more and more self-consciously as an alternative, a middle ground, to these extremes. I grew to see it as an extended exercise in the use of hypertext not as some novel or revolutionary method of writing, but instead as something that could quite simply be taken for granted. Though at times I've allowed myself to experiment with the pyrotechnics of the use of hypertext, I've come to feel that the true strength of the Boidem is that it represents an extended, but also limited, use of hypertext in a collection of over forty columns. Ultimately it's once again a case of Borges' "Argentine writer" metaphor (again): the most visible sign of the successful integration of the use of hypertext into writing is the fact that it starts to be taken for granted.

Go to: What a difference a da... makes, or
Go to: Trying to make some sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium