What role do “poets and philosophers” and other creative types have in the physical creation of the Internet?

I grew up reading the Choose Your Own Adventure Books (and inevitably always died with my first three choices, no matter what I did) and the world of hypertext storytelling Johnson talks about immediately evoked these books. However, as Johnson also goes on to point out, there are millions of Internet pages all connected by hyperlinks. The books I read were physical objects in the world (not just a bunch of tubes) limited to a finite number of words and pages. I like Johnson’s point however that while the type of story telling they envisioned did not pan out, mostly out of the mere impossibility of the logistics, he has optimism that of that conceit something better was created, and it relied on the tenacity of the “poets and philosophers.” And I have to agree that the way the hypertext exists now, as a connection between information, a way to build one’s wealth of knowledge in the shape of a constellation (to borrow Johnson’s word).

I also have to agree with his idea that creative people are just as needed as coders to build the infrastructure of the Internet. To make things like clicking a hyperlink possible, Internet needs the poets, the storytellers, the investigators, philosophers, artists, and creative. Because what good is a hyperlink that goes nowhere? What good is the Internet without the information and entertainment it provides? Is that not why it was created — to be able to be a network, like a spiders web, of interconnecting and cross-sectioning ideas? While Choose Your Own Adventure books are fun, they are limited and we ultimately can’t learn anything else from them. The internet does not have this problem; a symbiotic home to both the logical and illogical; infinite.