Linkrot

an experimental art form, which might transform the essentially linear nature of our reading into a branching game, puzzle or poem, in which the reader collaborates with the author. The pragmatists use links to try to enhance comprehension or add context, to say “here’s where I got this” or “here’s where you can learn more”; the hypertext artists deploy them as part of a larger experiment in expanding (or blowing up) the structure of traditional narrative. … The pragmatic linkers have thrived in the Web era; the literary linkers have so far largely failed to reach anyone outside the academy.

This risibly ignorant statement completely fails to acknowledge the impact of hypertext in popular culture: specifically the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which deployed links as part of a larger experiment in blowing up not only the structures of traditional narrative but also the Dread Fortress of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

Having duly clicked the link and read Rosenberg’s article, I’ll note that he leaves out (or perhaps just ignores as bad practice) a third class of links: the pointless cross-reference. At the moment these are largely confined to Wikipedia (which seems to welcome them). With any luck they won’t spread.

I, for one, am waiting for both fiction and non-fiction writers to embrace hypertext. I read a lot of thriller set in other countries and like to see the terrain (or street grid) about which they’re writing, so I often have Google Earth open. Similarly, when reviewing a journal article, I open JSTOR to some of the references. And I’m waiting for the development of good mobile versions of, say, Science magazine so I don’t feel like I’m an automaton going down the stairs to get my copy, reading through the 4-5 articles I understand, and then taking it out to the recycle bin. And if the references are in hypertext, so much the better.

By, as I was saying[1], strikeouts or the “[caret]H” convention). It’s not undermining linearity, true. But the same purpose couldn’t be served by a list of links at the end. Nor is it all that uncommon.

[1] Attempting to actually use the title attribute on an anchor tag seems to have unexpected results.

FWIW: For text that’s designed to help users get through complex and/or tedious technical procedures, the consensus seems to be that links at the end of a block of text, or in some other well-defined separate space from the main text, do the job better than in-line links, most of the time. Ease of maintenance for the person delivering such text is another consideration that points in the same direction. So the use patterns and the scale of the content are probably what define people’s choices.

Was our reading less efficient all of those pre-Internet years of reading academic texts laden with footnotes?

I would actually say yes. Footnotes that are anything other than citations play havoc with my ability to move smoothly through a work, especially ones that are continued on the following page. Even when I attempt to make a first path that resolutely ignores footnotes, my eye is often drawn into the more substantial ones. Hypertext linkage actually helps with this difficulty, since the “footnote” is hidden from view barring deliberate action by the reader.

This risibly ignorant statement completely fails to acknowledge the impact of hypertext in popular culture: specifically the Choose Your Own Adventure books

That’s because, thanks to all that mucking around in the Cave of Time, the Choose Your Own Adventure books have no longer had any such impact.

There are attempts to make links that warn the reader of where they might be going so that they can decide whether or not to follow them at this point. The project I work on used rollovers to do this precisely to avoid suspicion of in-text links that arises in readers who have been annoyed by Wikipedia-style links on trivial (non) connections such as days of the week or numbers or whatever. You can see it in action here.

But John’s right — this is latter day luddism. There’s a lot of it about, especially among academics. Some of them have built whole careers on being able to read and write very boring text. Why would they want people to have a way to get out of it?

mds@11 — if you’re distracted by long footnotes in books as much as you say and you want to read the text only, you could take, e.g., an index card or folded piece of paper and cover the footnotes up while reading. That should solve the problem (and also remove the grounds for your hyperlinks-are-superior-to-footnotes-because-they-are-hidden argument).

@14: It’s Nick Carr! Of course it’s a bad thing – this is Alli literature, intended to pass through your digestive tract without leaving any deposit of information, so your precious individual plumage of preconceptions can wave unhindered. Side-effects include oily anal leakage all over your blog.

What would be really interesting would be to look at the percentage of references in print that anyone ever follows up vs. those in hypertext. I recall trying to list stuff from Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister that I wanted to read, and y’know? I got as far as underlining them and wondering what it was this ibid guy knew…

Can we send the “intertubes rewire your brainz” dunderheads to go live with the “kidz brainz are different, therefore you must pay me to explain to you how to teach” assholes off to live on the island of “I better hope nobody checks the research I’m citing ’cause it doesn’t say anything remotely close to what I claim.” and let the rest of us get on with the business of reading, thinking, teaching, and learning with and without new technologies?

this guy would change his tune after a single visit to the tvtropes website, where the power (and infinite evil) of hyperlinks can be seen in all its glory.

mds and leo — surely endnotes are worse. Part of the story is how practiced one is at reading with notes — personally I read ignoring notes, returning later only if I think something is missing. But at least with footnotes a single half-glance tells me whether they might be worth looking at. Endnotes require me to open the bloody book to the back, find the note, and then decide whether its worth reading.

I have to say that I read hypertext the same way as books with footnotes — I just ignore it until I have i) figured out whether what I am reading is worth reading to the end and if so then ii) have actually read to the end. Isn’t that what everyone does?

To defend Wikipedia’s link style, it’s an encyclopedia which is a very special kind of text, and uses links in a very special way. Readers know that a link within a Wikipedia article will point to the Wikipedia article on the topic of the linked text. That means there’s much less risk of distraction, missing important links among a sea of trivial ones and so on. References and external links are generally fewer and are marked separately.

By contrast, the NY Times typically hyperlinks to something like “search the NY Times archives for articles on this topic”, so you mostly end up with rubbish, and there’s no way to tell except by clicking.

Endnotes require me to open the bloody book to the back, find the note, and then decide whether its worth reading.

Endnotes are primarily a modern publishers’ convenience at the expense of the reader, especially in monographs and similar texts which may have long citations. While digital typesetting makes life easier, footnotes are a bugger to set in aesthetically pleasing ways, and tend to require more pages (and thus more expense) than an endnoted equivalent. The argument that footnotes break up the body text is pretty flimsy.

I tend to read hyperlinked texts with sporadic right-clicks to tab out whatever catches my eye, whether for immediate glossing/juxtaposition or for reading afterwards. I was also a CYOA kid with lots of odd encyclopaedias and reference books on my shelves, and became adept at five-finger-bookmarking for nonfiction long before being exposed to digital hypertext.

The cost of footnotes is in the layout. They are an incredible pain and take a lot of human-hours to get right — and then a new one is added and throws off the pagination and thus the index, and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I think John Q has it right. The wiki is an excellent idea, not just the idea of multiple people editing it but also just the notion of a hyperlinked collection of information. As tvtropes has proven beyond refutation. Flat text doesn’t really have anything to compare to hyperlinked pages + ctrl-tab.

An even better example of the power of the hyperlink is rikaichan, a tiny firefox add-on which, when you roll your mouse over a Japanese word, produces a tiny pop-up window that gives you the reading and the main translation. This is a godsend given the physical barrier that is kanji. It’s not full hyperlinking, but it’s a similar idea and physically impossible in paper text. An equivalent example would be an eBook reader with a dictionary that would enable you to tap on words to read them.

This sort of thing is invaluable when you’re learning a language, or using your second language to read outside your field. I do a lot of (literally) very arcane reading in Japanese and if I had to do it the old-fashioned way my language learning would be hideously slower. Hyperlinks are Teh Awesome!!111

and surely CYOA came long before hypertext, at least as far as popular culture was aware.

One of the things that Suck.com did back in the now-ancient history of the web was use links for ironic purposes, which I suppose is part of a grand tradition.

Absolutely. See, for instance, Flann O’Brien or ETA Hoffmann.

That should solve the problem (and also remove the grounds for your hyperlinks-are-superior-to-footnotes-because-they-are-hidden argument).

Um, yes, because moving an index card or piece of paper from page to page is indistinguishable from not following a hyperlink. But I thank you anyway, and will probably give it a try.

Donald Knuth wrote a program, called LaTex, which doesn’t help with that.

Theoretically, it does if you use it with Emacs. There’s a control-code sequence for flawless footnote layouts. Unfortunately, no one knows what it is, or even if it can be typed with a normal keyboard.

I am comfortable asserting that this is an atypical experience by the standards of the general population, if not by the standards of CT commenters.

Dude, Cave of Time. In this timeline, Borges is bigger than Seuss with the primary school demographic. All thanks to driving that SUV full of Selectric typewriters and Red Bull into a cave.

Henry, thanks for the summary and providing the occasion for such a wealth of commentary!

I should say that, yes, I was fully aware of the irony in the “what if Carr had linked to the studies?” question, wrote it into an early draft of my post, and removed it. I figured it was more fun for readers to make that connection for themselves.

Ajay: I will take your comment as a joke, right? We’ve got some old Choose Your Own Adventures on my kids’ shelves, but, um, Not Changed Our Culture, I think? I suppose they can be understood as starter drugs for RPGs. But most kids find their way there without any help from CYOA. (I did, as a ’70s teen who purchased the first edition of D&D to play.) And I think it’s a long stretch to read the popularity of World of Warcraft as an instantiation of the dreams of literary hypertext artists. Different goals, different audiences.

Ben: the sort of linking you’re referring to at BSNYC is what I think of as the Suck.com style. (Nick S. refers to this too. I wrote about it in 1997, and again in Say Everything.) It’s the link as ironic reference, scare-quote disavowal, or meta-commentary — certainly a lot closer to “the dream of hypertext artists and theorists” than utilitarian web linking. But it remains, I think, a fringe pursuit. Not something that can be usefully dragged in, pro or con, to a debate about the Web Rotting our Brainz.

Doctor Science: I have been reading Jakob Nielsen since the Web was wee. I agree that he offers valuable insights, but don’t take every word as gospel. Unclear to me how my failure to cite him discredits my argument. But certainly I agree with him that links improve credibility. And my forthcoming third post in this “Defense of Links” series is all about that very theme.

It would take a good browser hacker about five minutes to make a plugin that could hide/unhide hyperlinks with a keystroke. Instead of all this outgassing, maybe Nick Carr or someone should make that happen and see if it makes him happy. My guess is not; he’ll just have to move on to something else to fuel his net.alter_kocker routine.

I would also say that as tabbed browsing is becoming the norm, the problem of hyperlinks breaking up the narrative of the first page you start on is less of a problem – if I see a link that might be interesting to follow up now I can middle click and carry on reading and get to it later (or switch over to it and switch back later). Of course on some sites like Wikipedia/TVTropes this can rapidly start expanding towards infinite tabs all too easily if you get careless/interested.

This would be much funnier if LaTeX’s behavior when setting text could be influenced by something you did while editing the text.

Indeed. There are, however, a few dozen LaTeX packages, which, if arranged in the correct order and accompanied by the sacrifice of a cockerel, have the potential to produce reasonably typeset footnotes.

But it remains, I think, a fringe pursuit.

And perhaps an attempt to perpetuate an old-school web sensibility — that Salon link reminds me that so little of the web c. 1997 is readily accessible — that came out of having a disproportionate number of crit-theory types online in the early years. It’s hardly surprising that this has faded over the past decade, and I suspect the autogenerated linking mechanisms that arrived with Blogger had a big role in that, but it’s going to be interesting to see whether the technology of agglomeration — tweets in your Facebook, Foursquare in your Flickr, linked content injected into your blog — becomes the new norm.

Dr Science: writing as a blogger rather than a commenter, I find Nielsen’s result that links improve credibility comforting. It goes far to justify the work I put in to a blog post – for me, typically about as much getting the links right in as writing the text.
It’s not just that an unopened link says “this writer has gone to the trouble of sourcing this statement”. It also says “more context for this statement here”. This allows a much more more concise and epigrammatic style; the qualifications and nuances can often be left to the source. So links allow a certain compression of information, as well as a temptation to self-inflicted information overload.

This is not a ridiculous claim – but I would like to see some real research on it.

Me too. My own experience reading over hyperlinks is that they are cognitively equivalent to reading over a parenthetical phrase such as (which is online) or (available at JSTOR). They start to become a cognitive overload at the 2-4 per paragraph mark, or when I have to stop to think, what in the hell could this link be? (As in the case of Still being hyperlinked above: I had to mouse over, which meant pausing for a couple seconds. No biggie, but also not completely trivial. And I did pause mid-sentence to do that.) When I read Rosenberg’s name in red underline font, I was aware there was a link there to his article, but this was no more distracting than becoming aware of, “oh, Scott Rosenberg, that’s a person’s name” (which clearly takes zero to minimal effort).

I wonder whether I’m self-evaluating that experience accurately, and/or whether others — readers of all varieties — have a similar experience. As a volunteer, I remember feeling surprised at just how much a struggling/learning reader would struggle with any deviation from the main point of a text (a parenthetical aside like this one would probably leave such readers nontrivially disoriented, because they’re reading one word at a time so carefully and painstakingly that they’ve long since lost all sense of what this sentence was about). So I wonder in particular, for those readers who have to push their way through sentences like viscous jelly, what effect would a link have on their ability to comprehend? Would mouse-over pictures for nouns help with learning to read, or hinder the process? Etc.

Salient:

My observation is that very young or slow readers ignore the links to focus on the text. It’s true that the great press of time online tends to make readers impatient, less willing to tolerate (or unravel) very long sentences or paragraphs: imitating Hemingway is more likely to work than imitating Dickens. But that, of course, is true offline as well — and there’s also the fact that reading from a screen is generally more physically tiring than reading from paper.

Tom — the fault may lie in my effort to respond both to Carr’s “delinkification” post and to his larger argument against links in “The Shallows.” (Ironically, of course, I can’t actually link to the latter.) You’re right that the post is fairly moderate in its stance. Carr is always careful to qualify his arguments, and that makes him a far more valuable critic of the Web than many of his peers. He’s also an adept blogger (and linker) himself, which is one reason I find his position so confounding (and his willingness to exaggerate the meaning of these studies so surprising).

In “The Shallows,” the case against links becomes one piece of a larger indictment of the Web and online reading, and the antipathy towards links in general is much clearer (though still heavily qualified). The book makes a sustained argument that the Web, with its links and other distractions, cripples our ability to read deeply. The reader comes away with a pretty clear picture that Carr would be a lot happier to turn to a world without the Web, and without links. He admits all the good things the Web provides, and allows for how much time he spends on it himself, but the weight of his argument lands heavily on “turn back the clock!”

I do think the phrase “campaign against links” is fair, given that the post occasioned a sporadic (though, thankfully, fading) effort on the part of a variety of online writers to “delink,” or pile up their links at the end of their pieces.