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Changing connections
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Older connections
Three kinds of pipes carrying connections
Map of a changing set of connections among blog entries
Because items in (physical or virtual) places are available independently of their normative grammatical connections, those connections can be altered by new patterns of action that develop new accesses and connections. Living in the suburb can change its connections and grammatical norms. Such flexibility is harder to find in a hypertext, where there is usually no way to reach other parts of the text except through intentionally established connecting links. Neither on the web nor in separately published hypertexts can the reader make new connections that will be publicly available. In the suburb, some intentional links are carried in quasi-permanent pipes (highways, wiring, conduits), while others exist in alterable habits and practices. Of course the fixed pipes such as highways can carry many different kinds of connections at once, or over time, and the particular qualities of the pipes will encourage certain kinds of connections and discourage others. A communally created hypertext might be arranged to receive added links, so that there would not be a single permanent armature but an ongoing process of linking. In this case some mechanism would have to be set up for the elimination of links, or at least for their grouping into separate path sets, or else the text would become so cluttered that its links would be useless. (Such a text would be one way of emphasizing the non-finality of structure and embeddedness of formal systems within a process of reinterpretation.) We are more used to the change of connections over time in physical space, though sometimes the relative permanence of physical adjacencies and architectural effects can fool us into thinking that a place's meaning and use are more stable than they really are.