Links make you lazy.
I’ll put it to you right now to decide whether this is worth reading at all: Have you found yourself lately drifting on the web? Ever look at a page and wonder how you got there, even for just a split second? Wasting a lot of time lately just clicking through Reddit or Digg?
Well, now that I have your attention, I’ll relate to you a relevant anecdote.
I was in kindergarten the first time I used a card catalog. My teacher did not believe I could read. She had me select a book that I did not have at home to read to the class. I was quite annoyed, yet excited at the opportunity. Five year olds can be complex, it seems. Don’t you remember?
My affection for the card catalog grew with my curiosity. By third grade, I was writing research papers and presentations, one of which was on microbes (which I pronounced micro bees – makes a strange kind of sense, doesn’t it?). While doing this project, it was the card catalog that suggested the best paths of research. Someone had walked this path before me and had left a list of books under 576 (yeah, it’s 579 now. I’ve been around longer than Lindsay Lohan). It was pure brilliance.
Fast forward to the first time I did research online. It was a cold winter day, a perfect time to warm up my C64 and try out my new CompuServe account – at 300 smoking baud. If you don’t know what the hell I am talking about, suffice it to say that there was exponentially more material available for my lucid dreaming research paper than there was for the unseen bees. Yet, it was still manageable.
I built my first website in 1994. I was immediately sucked in by the seemingly infinite ways I could contribute to the world community by linking documents in my sites. I was able to learn Java while it was in alpha using links, and created an entire career for myself by following in the footsteps of those who knew by the links they left as breadcrumbs. For a young chump, I did pretty well.
If you haven’t been online for at least 10 years or so, you might not have known that links used to be as good as the card catalog I used in the ’70s. People put real thought into connecting to another place on the web because it was novel, important, and full of promise. Nowadays, links are cheap. Hell, how many links have you whizzed by in the last hour? On the last page?
Do this for yourself. Today, tomorrow – right now – take a rough count of all of the links on each page you go to, just for a few minutes or so. Every page that takes you nowhere – like this page for instance, or anything off of Reddit or Digg that you read and then close – counts as a zero. A Zero is like Coke Zero – sweet and tasty, but no calories and no nutrition, at least as far as the usefulness of the links are concerned. If these pages have ten, twenty, fifty links on them, consider: Are they wasted?
What about the pages you leave by clicking on one or more links – are they any better? Are they taking you closer to your destination? Or, are the clicks just wasting your time?
Sometimes, when you link for a human, you take from them a good set of search results. Who says I know what needs a link in this rant – for you? And what if I do link something? Am I better at choosing what is linked than a quick Google? Do links narrow rather than broaden horizons? Do links dampen critical thinking?
Most importantly, would I be wasting your time by linking to other pages? Would I be moving the web closer to being The Mundaneum than it already is? Is there such a thing as link pollution?
I could be making a point right now by linking to something useless, but that would be like shoving plastic bags down the throats of pelicans to show that we need to clean up our oceans- undoubtably an extreme comparison, but it does show that there are other ways to make a point.
It should have been Johnnie Cochran who said, “Where there’s a link, you don’t have to think.” I’d rather your mind spent a few more cycles here than it would normally. It’s good exercise.
Now where are you going? Cut out the middleman! Do your own search.
