Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration…
This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of posts, “In Defense of Links.” There was a lot of discussion after Carr proposed that we should stop inserting links within the text; he suggested we could save them all till the end instead — like footnotes, or a list of suggestions for further reading — because they add to our “cognitive load” by making us decide whether to click or not.
I can’t really complain that someone wants to experiment a little with conventions — after all, the Web is a work in progress — as long as the aim is to improve communication and collaboration, i.e. as long as it promotes learning and development across a wider community, rather than reinforcing outmoded practices and mindsets.
There are a few places I sometimes feel links would be unnecessary and unwelcome distractions: long pieces of “lean back” reading that run up to several thousand words which I can read purely for pleasure. I enjoy the long form experience; I practice and promote extended periods of deep, immersive, focused thinking. I’m not sure links would add any value to James Wood or Michael Lewis, and I’m perfectly happy reading an NYBooks review with all of the links at the top.
But those already conform to Carr’s proposal. He was referring to things like this, complaining that every link requires us to make a decision, which becomes distracting.
But it’s good to have strategically placed interruptions (see Jonah Lehrer‘s point: ”focused attention is not always ideal”). We should be making decisions as we go along: when we hesitate to consider whether or not to click, we’re thinking critically, judging for quality and relevance, and using it as an opportunity to reassess the rest of what we already know — i.e. whether we need to learn more or ‘re-place’ some basic assumptions.
Look at science: look at how Darwin “discovered” his theory of evolution. He couldn’t just focus on a single object, he had to arrange a lot of evidence in relation to other evidence — species in relation to other species, fossils in relation to other fossils, offspring in relation to parents and those in relation to their parents and so on — until a story, a synthesis, and a conclusion emerged. Of course a lot of tasks in the scientific process require acute focus, but it’s the opponents of science who stress the importance of comprehending a single text as a self-enclosed source of value, while the way science is communicated is among the most distraction-packed, extraneously referent styles around.
Similarly this style of writing for the Web is as much about organizing links from the ongoing, surrounding discussion as it is about the ideas or opinions expressed in the piece itself (if any, yet). I start with some sources and things I want to share with people and then I try to tie them together into a bit of a story, and then hopefully I can add some kind of conclusion.
This notion of “placing” links in relation to each other is something I’ve adopted from Richard Rorty, the late philosopher-turned-literary critic. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he suggested that critics don’t evaluate things for merit,
rather, they spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies. In the course of doing so, we revise our opinions of both the old and the new.
To demonstrate I’ve picked James Wood’s review of some recent books relating to Alexis de Tocqueville:
Seen in this stained-glass light, “Democracy in America” is obviously a nineteenth-century book about the fragility of faith, written on the threshold of the age of Darwin and Flaubert and Ernest Renan, a book as much about moral authority as about freedom, and about how to retain the former in an age of the latter—when, as he writes, “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished,” and “the lights of faith are obscured.” The prestige of royal power has vanished, Tocqueville says, “without being replaced by the majesty of the laws.” Matthew Arnold could not have put it better.
Those names aren’t just being dropped to show off the author’s erudition. “Darwin,” “Flaubert,” “Renan,” and “Arnold” represent specific ideas, and the reader needs to make those associations (i.e. links) to appreciate the meaning of Wood’s review. Comprehension isn’t merely about keeping track of those references, but rather pausing to reflect on, inquire into, and posit the meanings behind them. Matthew Arnold points to Culture and Anarchy and “sweetness and light” meaning beauty and truth — “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” in a process of constant cultural diffusion.
Linking is a way to make those associations more vivid and rich. It makes me more careful as a thinker and writer to consider what people might find by clicking through. Of course I should always think about specific references — even in mediums that don’t afford actual links — but in this medium it’s essential: it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses that the affordance to link nudges me to keep my expressions concrete and relevant.
It’s often all that we can do. Information can change so fast and the truth can be so fleeting that our careful judgements and explanations can quickly become worse than no judgements or explanations at all. Better to identify key points of reference — like constellations — we can use to orient ourselves and communicate with our collaborators as we go along, constantly checking our bearings and staying alert for new factors instead of staring down at a book that was written at another time and place.
Skeptics dwell on one or two premises — “in this medium… it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses” — and urge against innovation instead of recognizing that their anxieties are virtually identical to those of so many past generations. As Lionel Trilling wrote:
[Democracy in America] made John Stuart Mill modify is faith in democracy, and Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Scherer, and Arnold himself, foresaw for Europe a wave of Americanism–by which they meant vulgarity, loss of distinction, and above all, that eccentricity of thought which arises when each man, no matter what his training or gifts, may feel that the democratic doctrine of equality allows him to consider his ideas of equal worth with those of his neighbor.
As in Tocqueville’s time, we’re trying to retain a semblance of authority in an age of expanded freedom. And we’re coping not just with Cheeto-eating bloggers but a priesthood of scholars who appeal to their authority to hide (even from themselves) the fact that they’re often wrong, and professional marketers and scam artists (not necessarily in the same category; not necessarily different either) who are adept at influencing people in potentially harmful ways.
Complain if you want but the fact still remains that we’re caught up in that and eventually need to do something about it, beyond fretting and complaining.
Now that the traditional means of establishing authority and trust are increasingly obscure and misleading, the practice of linking (both actually and metaphorically) is the most effective way to earn it. Links in a text aren’t just about connectivity but credibility and readability as well, as Jason Fry argued [update: forgot to mention Scott Berkun's point, essential to the argument for embedding links: "In a glance I can see the link density of a page – too much and I might pass, but none at all, and I might wonder if the writer has thought much about the topic, since they didn’t bother to show they’d found a reference to support or counter their own claims"]. Rosenberg didn’t explicitly go as far as I do but I’ll certainly echo what he wrote in the third part of his series:
The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?
So it’s about quality and discipline as much as it’s about quantity, equality and freedom of expression. Above all it’s about getting past the myth of perfection: we learn to assume that value is in the process of questions, corrections, and connections. Ironically, concentrating on the wrong books for too long is ultimately the worst distraction of all. In most cases, we’d be better off if we skimmed.
Even if Carr’s worst fears are realized and the Web destroys people’s capacity to concentrate, I’ll happily say fairwell to extended one-way lectures and screeds foisted on submissive publics (heaven forbid we have to pause to make decisions in the course of learning). I’ll happily welcome conventions that compel readers to take responsibility for finding and filtering the best knowledge, forming their own interpretations, and weaving those ideas into our cultural fabric for others to criticize, correct, or corroborate. (Steven Pinker and Steven Johnson made arguments that complement this.)
It isn’t techno-utopianism. It isn’t quite a compromise either. It’s more like a “third way” forward. And it’s the same old notion that Matthew Arnold advocated in Culture and Anarchy in the 1860s: preserve the best of the Church and the aristocracy but let the static aspects fall away; allow the best democratic values to flourish but exercise discipline against democracy’s excesses:
This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality… who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and the learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time…
So but what exactly is “the best knowledge and thought” of our time? Maybe we spend so much time arguing about what the Internet “is doing to us” that we neglect to actually use it (or quietly decline to use it) to generate knowledge and thoughts worth sharing. So let’s get on with it…
The general conclusion of my book (and several years of soul- and truth-seeking) was provided for me by Charles S. Peirce:
… it may truly be said that there is but one thing needful for learning the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true… No matter how erroneous your ideas of the method may be at first, you will be forced at length to correct them so long as your activity is moved by that sincere desire.
If we really care about making our knowledge the best it possibly can be, we’re not going to let links or anything else distract us as long as we have a choice. My choice is to have choices, and to see how much information we can synthesize. It isn’t easy, but with practice a lot of people might be surprised.
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