The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink
The people who theorized about hypertext before the web would probably be scratching their heads now — and might be if any of them are still alive — about the fact that now, when hypertext is everywhere, almost no one is talking about it or consciously exploring its unique properties.
Maybe it was easier to explore this stuff back before it was ubiquitous. When you start studying common, everyday phenomena, it’s very easy to get caught up in these typical responses: either that you’re missing the point (“I don’t care about hypertext, all I want to do is write on my blog”); that what you’re saying is too obvious to be informative (“yes, yes, we all know that’s how links work; great work, Captain Obvious!”); or, if you happen to discover something unusual, unintuitive and highly unobvious, that you’re making the familiar out to be something it’s not (“No, no, that can’t be right! That’s not how this works! I know it, I use this thing all day!”). You can’t win.
Anyway, this article is sort of an exploration of the literary device the hyperlink is, and the nature of the web as a medium. Or something. Just read the article (via):
The hyperlink is the most elemental of the bundle of ideas that we call the Web. If the bit is the quark of information, the hyperlink is the hydrogen molecule. It shapes the microstructure of information today. Surprisingly though, it is nearly as mysterious now as it was back in July 1945, when Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea in his Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think. July 4th will mark the second anniversary of Ribbonfarm (I started on July 4th, 2007), and to celebrate, I am going to tell you everything I’ve learned so far about the hyperlink.
