Association and hypertexts

What a lot of creative projects we saw today--I'm really impressed by what's been created. Everyone started with the same material but were inspired to develop such individual interpretations--hats off!

But anyway, I wanted to go a bit further with tophat1's post about the non-fictional nature of a lot of the hypertexts our class seems to have created. We've had "autobiographies," reflections on a Los-Angeles state of mind, family trees... They've all been really cool.

But this made me wonder: why is it that our memories seem to lend themselves so well to hypertexts? This seems to be something that Oz's project (as well as Nightowl's) are addressing. I keep thinking of silversprung's comment on how hypertexts, like thought, are associative. Is it this richness of association, all wrapped up in our memories, that we're seeing expressed in these nonfictional hypertexts?

I felt that this idea of association in memory was particularly noticeable in zoey's presentation on the Los Angeles that her parents had experienced--the links between phrases and signs, between her mother's desk calendar and different stories... Perhaps a hypertext best expresses the way that we sort and catalogue ideas in our minds--we have our own filing systems that aren't linear, rather they overlap.

Another interesting aspect to this question is what happens when these links, these filing systems, break down (which, if I understand correctly, is what a lot of Oz's project is looking at)?

Anyway, it just seemed really cool, and I'm not through sorting it all out yet.

So thank you all for some really awesome projects!