Hypertext living

On the Internet, hypertext has taken away the linear or, at best, hierarchical organization of information to put in place an anarchic linking of resources, yet highly robust and effective. While web-surfing we experience flow in a labyrinth of of hyperlinks. With every click on a link we cross geographies, subject areas, styles, languages. Hypertext allows each individual to chart his or her own unique path (better, experience) across the vast resources of the web.

The mobile phone plays a similar game with our lives. It does to our social networks what hypertext has done to the Internet. Before the mobile, our life was largely predefined and fairly linear. Disruptions or changes-of-mind were hard to accommodate, thus undesirable. With the mobile phone we can make and review our choices any time, all the time. This is now attractive because it is easy to restructure the rest of our plan fairly easily. With the mobile phone we can move back and forth across the web of our social networks without being bounded by time or space. In the 'traditional' example, a professional exits the family social network in the morning, to join the traffic network, to proceed to the professional network, to meet the sports club network and to rejoin the family network later in the evening. This represents a linear arrangement of social networks in time and space. With the mobile phone, I can escape a boring meeting at work by exchanging SMS with my partner while I also comment on the discussion going round the table. Social networks can be nested or rearranged in time and space at will. We can cross vast expanses of social networking by flowing through our contact list on the mobile phone. And because we can also participate in multiple social networks simultaneously, our living is not only hypertexted, it's also windowed!