By Jason Wilson
I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and was finally pushed off the fence today by Nicholas Carr’s post “Experiments in delinkification.”
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.
The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.
As legal researchers, it is bad enough having to avoid links (I’ve chased many rabbits down many holes in my lifetime) in our work. To have to continue the struggle in our leisurely reading seems unnecessary, particularly if the point to blogging is to focus one’s attention on a thought. So, for all future posts, links will now appear at the bottom, similar to footnotes but without the visual cues to distract you. I will strive to make the link’s relevance (and placement) clear, and for any contributors to this blog, will ask they do the same.
[Image (CC) by p_valdivieso]
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Post Links:
Nicholas Carr, Experiments in delinkification.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Jason, I think you need to trust your readers' own judgements as to whether and when to click links. Relegating links to footnotes and thus making linking more awkward is perverse.
Nick,
Is the trust argument really one of control? I'm not taking a position here (this is more of an experiment than anything else), but do you believe that readers are offended if a writer assumes control over the way content is consumed on a blog? That is definitely the case with many of my friends who refused to read a blog that only provides snippets of posts via RSS. But does the same hold true for links?
Would it be better to write a post like a news article with absolutely no link attribution at all, simply good cite form?
For you, what difference does it make to find the link at the end rather than in the body?
Simon Fodden over at Slaw has a much better post on this issue, titled "Hypolinking." http://www.slaw.ca/2010/06/01/hypolinking/
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