Hypertextual linking of information is one of the basic principles of digital media. We suppose this principle to be discovered in metaphorical thinking with the help of the so-called absolute metaphors. We derive the notion of an absolute metaphor from Hans Blumenberg's metaphorology, and we interpret metaphors according to Max Black's interaction theory. Our aim is to interpret these absolute metaphors as being open to new implications, just as they are open to a pragmatically determined dialectical interaction of organic and mechanical meta-phorics. We follow the direction of interactions within these metaphorics in a philosophical attempt to explain the nature of mechanical and organic systems. In particular we will analyse the metaphors 'association is trail' (Bush), 'computer is a clerk' (Engelbart) and 'hypertext is a Xanadu' (Nelson). All these metaphors are both organic and mechanical. That is why we can say that hypertext is both an organic and mechanical system. 'It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the, actuality above the idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning: their direction, and he awakens them. But such a man is far from being a simple proposition. Since his ideas, to the extent that they are not idle fantasies, are nothing but realities as yet unborn, he, too, naturally has a sense of reality; but it is a sense of possible reality, and arrives at its goal much more slowly than most people's sense of their real possibilities.'
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