Unbundling The Web, One Link At A Time

Nick Carr wonders if we should sequester all of out links at the end of posts, instead of spread wherever they are referred to, to minimize distraction from what the author is getting at.

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.

I don’t want to overstate the cognitive penalty produced by the hyperlink (or understate the link’s allure and usefulness), but the penalty seems to be real, and we should be aware of it. In The Shallows, I examine the hyperlink as just one element among many - including multimedia, interruptions, multitasking, jerky eye movements, divided attention, extraneous decision making, even social anxiety - that tend to promote hurried, distracted, and superficial thinking online. To understand the effects of the Web on our minds, you have to consider the cumulative effects of all these features rather than just the effects of any one individually.

Carr is not explicitly trying to ‘unbuild the web’ as Jay Rosen styles it. He’s worried about our vagrant attention, like a school marm that simply wants us to get back to practicing our penmanship instead of looking at the clouds out the window.

Carr has forgotten that the journey is more important than the map, no matter how skilled the cartographer.

So this is actually not an knock against the architecture of the web, but an attack on flow: the way our minds work when presented with the increasingly fluid and meandering streams of information and connection that make up our online world.

Carr’s all about focus, and getting things done. It’s not that links are bad, in and of themselves: it those that click on them, wander off for ten minutes reading some supporting or dissenting opinion or three, they are the malefactors. How dare them! Don’t them know they are supposed to read the essay word for word the way the author intended? The liberties they take by wandering all over!

It’s the same problem with newspapers, I bet Carr would say. The editors in their wisdom know how much of the newshole is supposed to be devoted to stories, and what’s on the front page. That’s their expertise. We aren’t supposed to make those decisions for ourselves!

Anyway, I think that Carr is just a bit too bookish and disconnected from the pulsing flow of the web to see what’s at play, here. Carr has forgotten that the journey is more important than the map, no matter how skilled the cartographer.