The hyperlink illustrates how far conceptual abstraction has come. Since I have been forgoing web links, let's pause to consider their meaning. Not only their meaning but also what their lack of presence now signifies.

An air of quaint, old-fashioned, musty technology wafts about the term hyperlink despite its relatively recent genesis. In the not so distant past, the hyperlink was devised as an effective means to connect one hypertext document (or resource) to another. Tim Berners-Lee put both of these babies to work in his vision of the world wide web. These two unprepossessing words, hyperlink and hypertext, have propelled us four decades into the past and halfway down a rabbit hole of abstraction and yet we're still miles from where I hope we end up.

Laying aside the genesis of these terms (but recognizing that we're only a few precious decades from both their creation and neologization) and ignoring the delicious irony of my not actually linking to a site that more completely explores their development, let's examine how the little old hyperlink has influenced communication by looking at what happens when it's not here.

Because I've not used any embedded links (let's use the shortened, more common link from now on) in my posts thus far, I've disturbed the delicate—and mostly organic—ecology of the web. These days, a site without links is essentially a dead site. (Poor little site, dead before it even got started going.) Perhaps Google can take some responsibility for the linkified world that's freezing out my poor young site. Their business model can be described in one word: search. Search algorithms are partial to a nice, friendly outgoing link or two. Or three. Or twenty. Gregarious content likes to be connected to other outgoing content.

That's not to say that human minds don't work in similar ways: we like to categorize things, name them, and place them into mostly tidy little piles. Piles that some of us like to refer to as mental models. Happily, that brings us back to our original point about abstraction.

As this site grows in content, it will require more robust navigation to help you parse it. And here is where our mental model of abstraction blooms into something really quite beautiful to behold: your perception of this site is already robust. You developed mental models on your forays to other sites: they have provided you with ideas about this one. The complexity of navigation, when it does finally arrive, will not befuddle you. You won't ask, "What are those blue underlines? How do you get back to that other page?"

When you think about this site, and I hope you will, you'll think something along the lines of, "This idea correlates with that idea from the other day, and that one reminds me of an experience I had myself." Some of your feeings about this site will stem from the ease or difficulty with which you connect the dots of content; some of how you feel will be derived from whether or not this site meets your preexisting conceptual expectations. The more data points I include here, the larger my gestalt garden might appear to you. (It's worth noting that most likely you would mentally categorize the thoughts on this site even if I never added any helpful navigation—you wouldn't be able to stop yourself—but with the guideposts you'll be able to see alternative patterns of thought, evanescent and shimmering in their pretty, authorially defined groups.) The navigation elements will simply help to engender additional levels of perception that you will easily scaffold and assimilate all by yourself.

Your advanced level of perception and conceptual abstraction means you're primed—you're already expecting the embedded link, you're already attuned for the outward connectivity and informational hierarchy. In other words, when the nav finally does arrive, you might not even notice. However, if you're hanging around waiting for this site to fully revert to the expected interactive norm—well, no guarantees there. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. I sort of hope it won't.

Regardless of where it ends up, the next time you visit this site, or any site, take a moment to consider the many levels of mental abstraction you're able to parse in a single glance—e.g., letters, words, sentences, typography, graphics, links, sounds, ads, motion, concepts, ideas, hierarchies, cultural norms, social expectations, etc. Stop for a second to admire the depth and complexity of your own abstract cognitive abilities.

You're a freaking work of art.