Thanks for your great comment. It’s certainly true that we’ve been searching and sorting since the Dewey Decimal System, and the ability to search doesn’t depend on hypertext. That being said, the ability to extract meaning from the relationships—created by hyperlinks—doesn’t exist without the relationships themselves.

So, yes, they do co-evolve, but there is a definite ceiling that can only be broken once documents are interconnected.

What do you think?

In my previous comment, I separated “Infrastructure” and “Access”, whereas you combine them into “Existence”. I think that’s fine really, as we’re talking about the Internet after all.

I can see what you’re getting at with the forming of relationships between documents. It’s the invention of hypertext that is the epoch-defining event. If we look at what we have today, not all digitally recorded relationships are done through hypertext (that’s an understatement), but that’s the start of embedding relationships between documents into documents, in a totally human-readable way.

Next I’d question whether you think this needs to come before the evolution of search/sort, or whether this depends on it. Or perhaps these co-evolve?

J.