On the Virtues of Hypertext, or the Unexpected Pleasures of Surfing the Web

In January, Mandy Brown wrote a pair of fascinating articles about the nature of hypertext. The first explores the text part of hypertext, asking whether or not hypertext is (or ought only to be) text. The second article takes on the hyper part, extolling the virtues of getting lost in that act those of us old enough to remember the days before Facebook used to call “surfing the web.” Here’s a little taste:

The hyperlink, with its super simple structure — a direction and some characters of description, which could be as straightforward or as subversive as you wanted — did get off the ground, and it is indeed marvelous. The ability to follow links down and around and through an idea, landing hours later on some random Wikipedia page about fungi you cannot recall how you discovered, is one of the great modes of the web. It is, I’ll go so far to propose, one of the great modes of human thinking.

Brown goes on to talk a bit about Pierre Bayard’s, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, which I’ll admit that I purchased before I even made it to the end of Mandy’s essay (I love the Internet!). It’s a great little book whose central thesis is that interacting directly with the text of a book — you know, that act we typically call “reading” — is far less important than understanding how the book is connected to all the other books out there.

In other words, the links matter than the text. And hyperlinks are Bayard’s thesis made flesh. Or pixels, anyway.

Brown contrasts the glories of the hypertext web with the relative order of the the social media feed. The feed corrals the unkempt wildness of the web and organizes it all into a nice little stream, filtering out all the noise based on…well, ostensibly based on my interests plus my social graph but in practice based on whatever generates the highest returns for the venture capitalists who pay the salaries of the Keepers of the Algorithm.

Brown is exactly right that for all their usefulness, feeds can turn into traps, leaving you surrounded by the safe, the comfortable, the cute, and the familiar — never exposing you to the new or the challenging. It’s epistemic closure writ large.

That said, I’m less optimistic than Brown that the hyperlink — at least as its currently used — is the best way to counter the hegemony of the feed.

Let’s face it: hyperlinks are a lot of work. You have to:

• Read the original text, or at least enough of it to figure out what it’s all about.
• Follow a blind hyperlink — trusting that the author is making meaningful connections.
• Read enough of the new text to figure out what it’s about.
• Grok how the two pieces are related.

That’s all well and good if you’re the kind of person who geeks out over connections between big ideas — you know, the type who majors in the humanities at a liberal arts college. If not, well, it’s maybe asking rather a lot.

Small wonder feeds are winning.

I think that the underlying problem isn’t really the hyperlink. It’s that we still write as if we’re producing pages when in fact what we’re writing a bunch of zeroes and ones that are stored in a database. And even though many of us web types have moved on to talking about screens instead of pages, we still design UIs around showing long, linear blocks of text, broken up with some supporting images, video, and, yes hyperlinks.

In short, we still write linear nonfiction—each article or post or Vine or Snapchat story is (mostly) a self-contained argument. We use the hyperlink to create connections between these self-contained pieces.

For hyperlinks to truly come into their own, we’ll need to change the way we think about writing.

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