You may consider Ted Nelson's work as a thought experiment:
"A thought experiment is a device with which one performs an intentional, structured process of intellectual deliberation in order to speculate, within a specifiable problem domain, about potential consequents (or antecedents) for a designated antecedent (or consequent)."
A description of the issues leading to the experiment might run like this:
The world and our brains are vast repositories of data - data that we process, store, retrieve and process repeatedly.
We have many tools today to assist with this processing: the Internet, languages, databases and so on.
For the most part, the tools of today share common commonalities - a Von Neuman architecture, Ethernet protocols, Structured Query Language and more,
Ted is saying: Let's put all of this - yes all of it - aside for the moment and just think about how we think.
What ways could we use to process, store and retrieve of thoughts, feeling and being that - for the way we think - are natural, well-connecting and highly-timely?
Ted's work is the exploration of such possibilities. Whether Ted hits every nail exactly on the head or misses from time to time is immaterial. Ted hammers those nails in order to construct a door that opens the way to new types of thinking.
In a perfect world Ted's data structures would be accompanied by new chips, special operating systems and all manner of fresh languages and scripts.
In our little human world, however, we must evolve.
We are stuck with using today's tools to build tomorrow's paradigms.
This little web site is such an attempt.
We will bend JavaScript, play with the GitHub API, remix bits of the Internet so as to construct a simulacrum of Ted's world.
Let us open these new doors and see what is inside...
Theo Armour ~ 2015-02-08