Getting Hyper Over the Hyperlink

With so much information out there and so little time to absorb it, I generally do a fair bit of high-level skimming. The problem with that is that you sometimes miss details. Recently, I came across a campaign for “delinkification,” which protests the excessive use of hyperlinks embedded in writing, and it prompted a knee-jerk reaction from me.

 

How ironic, I shouted, that these pundits had posted a campaign against links on the web, which, let’s face it, has become the de facto platform for disseminating humanity’s information.If you look up in the address field of your browser, you will see the first two letters are “ht” and that, my friends, stands for hypertext. “What is hypertext?” you might ask. Well, it’s text that is linked, allowing you to branch off to related topics or media. From that simple little concept came the weird wired world that, love it or hate it, has totally revolutionized our lives.

Once I looked closer at what the delinkification folks were saying, though, I calmed down. I realized they weren’t condemning the concept of hyperlinks per se, just how they were being used willy nilly by the mainstream.  And, certainly, there’s a lot of truth to that.  Links don’t confuse people. People confuse people.

From the very beginning, developers who started implementing hypertext systems quickly realized the risk of their users getting “lost in hyperspace.” Each link is a potential interruption – an  invitation to let the mind wander off. When hypertext pioneer Vannevar Bush coined the concept of “trails of association,” which he believed mirrored the thought processes of the human mind, his target audience was educated researchers, not sightseeing cybertourists.

I used to lecture on hypertext, and here’s the cautionary example I gave. A student, let’s call her Alice, is reading Hamlet and she comes across the unfamiliar word “bodkin” and clicks on a glossary to get an explanation. It tells her that a bodkin is a type of dagger, commonly worn by men during the Elizabethan Age. Alice clicks through and finds out that the Black Death was a major peril that people faced. She follows a link to find out more about the Bubonic Plague and discovers it was spread not by rats, as originally thought, but by the fleas they carried. Intrigued, Alice explores fleas further, and reads how they have these big hairy legs, so she pulls up a close-up image. She was supposed to be reading Shakespeare, and instead Alice ends up counting the hairs on a flea’s legs.

It’s generally true that you want to keep your users, especially novice students, on the straight and narrow, and shouldn’t let them wander off the path. Give them a well-marked trail that’s hard to stray from, with lots of signposts, and with breadcrumbs to find their way back if they get lost. That’s just good information design. Unfortunately, many established design principles target the lowest common denominator, which drags everyone down to that level.

In the example above, the flea-infested world Alice stumbled into is a bad thing if you’re teaching English Lit. But what if she ended up becoming a future entomologist? I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in loving the free-form exploratory aspect of hyperlinks. I’ve stalked many a hard-to-find fact across multiple URLs, scanning and clicking through, or else have just happily just followed my world wide whimsy. In both cases I have been very grateful for the hyperlinks that people thoughtfully provided. When we say someone’s mind wanders, the connotation is typically negative. We certainly don’t want it from our surgeons or air traffic controllers. It’s not a bad thing for our thinkers and artists, though.

The promoters of delinkification say that sprinkling links in the middle of content impedes reading efficiency, and that’s probably statistically true, assuming you want a left-brain rather than a right-brain result. Some also say those links disrespect the reader, and there I take some issue. Personally, as a writer, I find it a tad arrogant to assume that whatever I’ve written is so brilliant, that readers should not be allowed to branch off at will – especially if I’ve given them an idea worth pursuing. If you love someone, let them go.