Hyperlinks, or the secret of the Internet’s extended memory…
Hyperlinks. Some of our bloggers love em (Mr Baker being the optimum case in point); some of commenters hate them (almost exclusively when Pete uses them). To begin with here’s how the Wikipedia page on the subject ascribes it’s conceptual origin (from 1945):
“As We May Think,” was a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex [or 'memory extender']) in which one could link any two pages of information into a “trail” of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.
A more recent account by Rick Garlikov of their practical uses on the net emphasises the degree of choice they provide the reader to make their own decisions about you they read the material. In particular he notes that:
…they allow readers to read in the order they prefer — the order that makes the most sense to them, reading details, reasons, explanations for major points, as they choose, rather than having to wait until they get to an explanation, or rather than having an explanation inserted in the middle of something when they are not quite ready for it yet and are instead seeking an overview or the “big picture.”
They have a role in building communities. Applications like Twitter and Facebook are driven by hyperlinks. They connect people with information and are the reason that the web feels like it’s getting faster and faster. For instance, Ian Paisley Junior being served by a summons at Stormont yesterday was almost instantly available to us yesterday, via Stratagem’s Twitter feed. It was quickly ‘reTweeted’ and the hyperlink passed on.
Some may argue that that’s fine over a 140 word sprint, but it disrupts the linear narrative of a blog post. This web style guide, aimed at web designers in corporations, government, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions identifies exactly this problem:
The primary design strategy in thoughtful hypertext is to use links to reinforce your message, not to distract users or send them off chasing a minor footnote in some other web site. Most links in a web site should point to other resources within your site, pages that share the same graphic design, navigational controls, and overall content theme. Whenever possible, integrate related visual or text materials into your site so that users do not have the sense that you have dumped them outside your site’s framework.
This is the kind of cautious guidance which has provided the principles behind big corporate sites like the BBC’s. But it’s far from the norm in the blogosphere. Even the BBC is slowly (painfully slowly) abandoning some of its more arcane policies on this. Large traffic volume sites like Instapundit and Matt Drudge consist almost entirely of hyperlinks… Rather than decrease traffic, as the authors here imply, sending readers offsite via hyperlinks to other sites actually increases inward traffic. There’s even a guerilla term for it: link juice..
It’s something Slugger has not been great at, and which we want to address in the new site design. In general it is more commonly used as an aide-mémoire. It can operate as a way of almost seamlessly navigating the past. In researching this article, I came across an early mention of Slugger from the BBC Magazine site (courtesy of Mulley’s policy of relentless outlinking), which in turn brought me back to this little forgotten (by me at least) gem from 2005.
Without a doubt, in terms of Slugger’s bloggers at least, the person comes in for regular stick is Pete. Take the last paragraph of a recent post (Sorry Pete, I know you are ‘in the room’, please forgive the slightly formal style for the moment) on Brendan O’Leary’s presentation to a conference at UCD. The last paragraph contains 10 links, 9 of them containing back links to previous stories on Slugger.
The criticism is that these are self referencing, in that many of them go back to articles previously written by Pete himself. Whilst is largely true, what generally goes unacknowledged in these ‘conversations’ is that each backlinking becomes a document in itself, linking backwards in time to earlier iterations of the same story. Just randomly picking a couple of links I found the earliest I came back to was a story on 10th July 2006 entitled about a hurried review of the funding of parades and community festivals…
Perhaps the most compelling argument against backlinking is that it weakens the argument by providing distractions to the reader. It disrupts the integrity of the linear argument. However this is to a degree mistaking wood for trees. The backlink itself is integral to the argument, not a distraction from it.
So perhaps in relying on the backlink the blog itself does not explain itself clearly, particularly for new readers? That might be more compelling if it came from new readers (who either turn away, or dig in as the notion takes them). Yet the criticism is lodged almost entirely by commenters who have been around for years, and know very well what’s contained within the backlink.
Which brings us back to the ‘extended memory’ idea in Bush’s original 1945 concept. My suspicion is that it is the inconvenient introduction of memory, which has a tendency to disrupt the favoured narrative or talking point of the that’s the real problem niggling underneath.
Just as the DUP found to their cost that pretending they had not spent the last two years in an intimate alliance in government with Sinn Fein did not wash with the Unionist electorate, the internet puts an extended memory at the disposal of both journalists and bloggers.
Love it, or loathe it, it isn’t going away you know! Discuss?
Mick and Kensei,
Great discussion. I wanted to contribute to this thread but I have been very busy.
I will have to read your comments in more detail when I get a chance and comment at a later date.
As a teacher of Web Communication and Design (also with a Master degree) I cannot ignore the strength of Kensei’s aguement, having briefly scanned the discussion I find myself strongly agreeing with many of his points.
Thanks USA. I look forward to hearing your considered opinion!
USA
How fortunate we are to have people of such calibre to enlighten us: it is good to know that the wise one will soon come back to us with a full analysis. In the meantime we will sit and await the kindness of our intellectual superior telling us his wise thoughts. It is indeed a mercy to have such genius present amongst us and his views “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:”
If only I had something like a masters degree: ah well most of us are ill educated peasants but at least we can await some pearls of wisdom.
Turgon
With the best will in the world, what did that add? At best, you look mean-spirited, at worst stupid. You’re usually better than this.
What exactly the quality of mercy has to do with this argument, besides you showing off your shakespeare, is somewhat beyond me. but in that vein, you may wish to consider, in your own life, the following-
“Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.” – Bassanio, Act I, Merchant of Venice.
Mick
As for intemperate or uncivil man-playing responses I’m afraid I can’t see them. You point to a post I did a few years ago suggesting I’ve somehow told people they should not listen to Kensei. But where is it?
Straw man, Mick. And I think you know it. You quite clearly, in this thread (not some ‘long-ago thread’), sought to dismiss Ken’s point on the basis, frankly, of his perceived political views, and their clash with Pete’s – you accused him, in your usual understated manner, of being misleading, deliberately or otherwise. You intimated that his problem with Pete was, in reality, that Pete’s a unionist, and so Ken, as a nationalist, was having a tribal dig, using blogging technique as a cypher, and so any merit in his argument can and should be safely ignored.
This is clear from the “cypher” remark I have already quoted. It’s not rocket science, it’s preety obvious bollixology of the type you very often rail against and at this stage, Mick, any professed blindness to it on your part is wilful.
You shouldn’t have made the remark, you don’t have the evidence to back it up, even if there was truth in it, it was irrelevant to Ken’s perfectly logical point, the remark was to all intents and purposes ad hominim, and as a technique, it’s beneath you.
Mick
Vannevar Bush was urging after WW2, as the Editor noted in his preface in the Atlantic, “that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge”.
In some of Pete’s posts, I think he is doing the opposite. Not always, maybe not even deliberately, but too often for it not to cause concern.
How information is organised is important, but what we’re talking about is making information less accessible for reasons I don’t know.
Bear in mind we’re only talking about the more extreme examples. There are plenty of Pete’s posts that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Nor am I too concerned about Slugger’s text colour or font size (though it is important), and style is subjective, although I would say that 95-word sentences are never a good idea (and writing too much in parentheses is irritating). [As is random italicisation - Ed] Indeed.
No. I think the main gripe is how well the argument is communicated to an audience, with particular reference to hyperlinks.
My preference is for links to (usually) provide supplementary information that, for example, backs up the argument presented in the original blog post. That original post should form its own whole though. Sometimes Pete’s posts don’t, and neither do the posts that he links to. Whether they provide some unrelated information that may be interesting is almost beside the point. Assuming we can tell what that point is, as it ain’t always clear.
To quote Garlikov back at you: “With hyperlinked passages, the reader may visit the hyperlink if s/he wishes or ignore it the first time through, in order to read the main ideas linearly first, going back later for the details as they relate to those ideas.”
And in response to your from Nevin’s site about the centrality of the reader in constructing meaning, it does talk about the “relatively self-contained property of the individual node”.
This is what is absent in the more extreme of Pete’s blogs. We are actively prevented from reading the main idea linearly first, nor it is self-contained. To derive any meaning, one cannot ignore the links, which by definition are a distraction, and the original argument is weakened by not being self-contained. But clicking links may not even help.
I find it a good idea to be able to read a post in its entirety AND understand it without having to necessarily click a link, as this disrupts the thought processes. If I want to get from A to B, I don’t want to be forced to walk up every side street on the way. If I want to explore, that should be my choice. If one is obliged to click links to comprehend the meaning in Blog Zero, and these lead to other texts that are equally incomplete in themselves, it leaves the bewildered reader wondering what the author was actually trying to say. So I would disagree with you when you say that “each backlinking becomes a document in itself”. I would argue that they are not documents in themselves at all, since they are incomplete in themselves, leading to the “recursion” mentioned by others. The narrative here is not unconventional; there is no narrative.
(cont.)
As Garlikov argues: “They [links] are extremely useful for tying together a great many different, related ideas without having to depart from a clear linear exposition. Because people read and listen in a temporal or sequential order in time, when one is writing or speaking, one has to organize ideas and statements in some particular order of presentation or other.” (My italics)
I also disagree that the problem is, as you suggest, the “inconvenient introduction of memory, which has a tendency to disrupt the favoured narrative”. That kind of discovery, to me, is a joy – to find, for example, a politician saying something today that contradicts his previous statements. But at what point do I know I’ve ‘arrived’ at the blog entry where the inconvenient memory is alluded to? Which link is it hidden behind? This is definitely not “making powerful contextual information readily available”. If it was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
But the more convoluted posts we are actually talking about feel less like some trailblazing intellectual enterprise than swimming in post-modern treacle, following multiple links and getting nowhere fast. You ask us to test the quality of the argument, but this is not always easy, because it isn’t clear what the argument is. His refusal to engage to explain doesn’t help. Small wonder that readers impose their own meaning and discuss what they want to talk about – and then get chastised for doing so.
It’s not just what you say that matters, it’s how you say it. I think Pete is an intelligent analyst, but a poor communicator. Nor do I see Slugger necessarily as a Memex, which makes it sound like some automated mechanical database, but a forum for people-driven dialogue. A place where connections of a human kind, as well as hypertextual, can be made. I think you understand this, as your own posts – whether I agree with them or not – are often models of good hyperlink use that drive debate in a constructive fashion.
A valuable and interesting discussion, but I feel kensei’s concerns are being dismissed too lightly.
Gonzo,
I completely disagree about the Memex thing. I set up Slugger in June 2002 partly as a response to the frustrations of using the Irish Times archives to find material I had read in the past and wanted to retrieve.
However anyone else sees it now, Slugger was intended as a research resource, not an agit prop soapbox as many of its contemporaries were or became. It remains (for me) its biggest value. I suspect that if you ask around you will find that it’s also considered a primary asset amongst journalists who use Slugger on a regular basis.
For a notable instance, whilst party spin told us May 2008 was a deadline, Pete recursively, as each profoundly misleading political statement arose, pointed us back to the relevant legislation and passages in the House of Commons that demonstrated clearly that it was not. Meanwhile, MSM hacks, by and large, accepted the party line without question.
This points to one of conventional journalism’s big problems in an era when news becomes a commodity: it is being incrementally dispossessed of its institutional memory. As old hacks are paid out, and younger (cheaper ones) take their place, the memory of even the semi distant past fall outside that institution’s human remembering.
Enter the Memex (or ‘memory extender’). Or as Pete has sometimes put it, the Baconian history. Back in 2005, Noel Whelan used RTE’s archives to brilliant effect to question the trustworthiness of SF’s denials that the IRA was involved in the Northern Bank robbery: http://url.ie/1qe6.
Aside from Rusty Nail, who uses backlinks in a way recommended by Kensei, very few of us use backlinks to such effect as Pete. They are strong and consistent. They may not always divvy up with the most coherent or literary of posts but then, as I am happy to repeat ad nausium, their value lines in their multi- as opposed to uni- linearity.
I’m not immune to the criticism people level at Pete’s posts. But then again, I am not sure many of our bloggers would be terribly happy if I were to open a bench test thread that invited their critics to have a go at them and then offer keep it open for the duration.
I was going to put a back link in from the Bloomsday round up to this thread; especially the bit about Joyce being criticised for being “blasphemous and unreadable”, but then thought better of it. He is not Joyce, nor Bacon either. But I am happy for him to continue to ‘blasphemous’ and ‘unreadable’ for as long as he wishes to blog on Slugger.
The Spectator/The Beach Tree/Whomever you are…
When you have something relevant and coherent say about the topic in hand, I will reply…
Mick
Temper, temper.
Your blog, or Memex, or whatever. Your funeral.
TS/TBT/WIA
‘Your funeral.’
Creepy…
Mick
“Creepy…
…cue maniacial laughter…
What can I say, I inspire fear and awe in all who know me
Look, if I offended you, sorry, sincerely. I just share some of Ken and Gonzo’s frustrations with Pete “The Link” Baker’s style of posting, and felt Ken in particular was getting a harder time than his comments merit. I apprecaite you seem to end up defending Pete a lot, but them’s the breaks.
But it’s your toy, you pay for it’s upkeep.
If you’d rather I left entirely, then I will, of course, oblige…
Look, all I want is people get down and dirty, but on the subject in hand not with each other.
I used to have a friend who made a decision early in his working life as a poet and a playwright to strip language and art down to its barest components.
For poetry (not prose), that meant stripping out all forms of punctuation, except for the line break, parentheses and and myriad of rhyme schemes (most traditional, some he made up). Some people hated it, some loved it.
I fell into the latter camp. It did not blind me to the fact that he was neither world’s greatest poet, nor to the fact that his device set up irritating barriers to the conventional reader.
But as soon as you stopped trying to read it in the conventional way, you could feel the punctuation become implicit in way the writing was put together. He shifted from explicit punctuation to relying on an insinuation of grammar from the words themselves, if you like.
It’s not my brief to defend Pete or his blogging style. He’s far from the only blogger on Slugger who brings incredible value to the blog.
But I do feel that in my role as Slugger’s editor it is right that I try to explain where I believe people are ‘misgetting’ what they see as a breach in good taste and convention.
That’s all…
Mick
I’m not sure anybody had a problem with “good taste”.
Fairest thing, then, for me and perhaps others, to do, I feel, is to simply ring fence and ignore Pete’s blogs entirely from now on.
I’m afraid I see no discursive value in them as they are, and I think it probably will save me time and energy, going forward, if I don’t bother trying to see a value that isn’t there.
If Pete can’t be bothered trying to communicate coherently, or make arguments as opposed to indices, I don’t really see any obligation on my part to listen. Nothing personal, Peter.
Onwards and upwards.
I’m not sure there is a single agreed problem. And there certainly is no obligation, either way.
Mick
But I do feel that in my role as Slugger’s editor it is right that I try to explain where I believe people are ‘misgetting’ what they see as a breach in good taste and convention.
Why did I read this thread again? It is rare that anything on here makes me actually angry, but I think you’ve if you have managed it.
Pay attention, here Mick:
No one is saying that the hyperlink is not a useful thing
No one is saying hyperlinks should not be used
No one is saying they are not useful in highlighting points
No one is saying they can’t be used to allow users to explore at their own pace.
Not. One. Single. Person. If Pete was overusing semicolons, the equivalent to your argument would be in explaining the importance of semicolons in joining related sentences, and how this helps the reader. It’s all true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what people are complaining about. Your argument is a Straw Man so large it could have a fair pop at Godzilla. We “get” it. It’s not the fucking point. It’s not even close to te fucking point. The poibnt is somewhetre else entirely.
The problem is they are being used badly. Multilinearity does not come into it. Anything that includes hypertest is, by definition, multilinear. It’s bad multilinearity, because it is confusing and hard to follow. What is it that when you read this goes away? What is everyone talking to you failing to communicate? Why don’t you get it?
And I have to wonder what kind of giant ego it takes to even compare a few posts on the state of politics here to Joyce. I mean really, wtf? It’s the same state of mind that apparently seems to celebrate opaquity and poor readability in a from designed for communication. It is the product of a deranged mind that has swallowed too much of its own bullsh!t.
This thread is almost Sir Humphreyesque in its conception. You create a thread to direct complaints, then don’t listen to the subject of those complaints, but rather talk on the mulitlinear nature of the hyperlink node in 3d dimensional n-space. When people make their points, with perfectly reasoned arguments, you dismiss then as being impossible to engage with because they are not talking about network path finding algorithms, and talk abotu anythign else other than the express purpose you apparently opened the thread for. What is going on? What is wrong with you?
Now, got that out, really, really done.
Kensei
I suggest to you, sadly, that the only course to reasonably take is to openly abandon any attempt to read, or comment on, any post from Pete unless and until he and Mick see reason on this one.
It seems to me fairly clear that Mick has decided to defend Pete at all costs on this one, even to the cost of reason and/or readership.
Indeed, I can only assume Mick did a bit of an IP trawl on myself to link this ‘nom de plume’ with one of my earlier ones, to ‘out’ me.
(I’d rather not think about why he tried that; at best, it seemed a bit petty, at worst…well, I’d rather not go there. I can only hope the intention was not Whelenesque. I tend toward the former, because, fundamentally, I’m pretty sure Mick’s a decent guy, but it’s more in hope than certainty.)
In the final analysis, it’s his blog (sorry, Memex), it’s his choice. But I don’t accept we have to be defined by those choices. And we don’t have to accept that poorly crafted, poorly argued self-referencing posts are worthy of consideration and discussion. Sadly.
TS,
I would not use that kind of information on anyone, short of a serious breach of the site rules. Your style gave it away.
No one, but no one is forcing anyone to eat Pete’s (multilinear?) blog puddings, let alone ‘self define’ (whatever that means?) by them.
Ken,
My argument is laid out above. It was an honest response to a line of criticism to Pete’s posts over the last couple of years. It’s an apologia, if you like.
Attack it, destroy it, or run it into the ground. But if you serially explode (as is your wont with anyone who disagrees with you on your own threads), then you lose the argument.
Whether you deserve to or not.
Mick
I would not use that kind of information on anyone, short of a serious breach of the site rules.
Fair enough, insinuation withdrawn completely, and my genuine apologies for doubting you. What’s my style giveaway, by the way (other than horrible grammar and spelling)?
And by ‘self-define’, I simply mean that it is possible to refuse to engage with Pete’s posts because of his style and communication issues, either directly, or when another poster attempts to use those posts as some sort of ‘evidence’ without accepting in any way the inevitable accusations that will follow that we are somehow “running away from the argument” or “losing the fight”.
As an example, in your message to Ken when you say “if you do A (which you usually do) you lose the argument”. With all genuine respect, you don’t get to decide that. You’re the editor, not the arbiter. And Ken doesn’t have to accept the argument is lost, or your standing to even adjudicate on that question.
Mick, sometimes the only way to deal with an attritional style is to refuse to be ground down.
I don’t, that’s true. But it’s a decent working assumption.
I’m not going to say exactly what it was… you might be offended…
Persistence and tenacity were in there, but your abiding love of cricket was the clincher…
Mick
Mea culpa on all charges. I can imagine my more humiliating faults
This is an all time great thread. Bloody hilarious. Thank you to all contributors.
Mick
My argument is laid out above. It was an honest response to a line of criticism to Pete’s posts over the last couple of years. It’s an apologia, if you like.
It’s a fine…. well, something, but it is not actually anything to do with the points made. I keep saying this, you keep not listening. Then repeating yourself as if I didn’t hear well enough the first time and just don’t get it.
It’s like various parties here trying to convince each others the worth of their Constituional position. If only they explained slower, or clearer, the scales would just fall and then they’d understand everything would be ok. But actually, what they are doing is just not listening to what the other person is saying, and just ponticating on their own topic. Why aren’t you listening Mick? Try listening to what I (and others) have actually said.
Attack it, destroy it, or run it into the ground. But if you serially explode (as is your wont with anyone who disagrees with you on your own threads), then you lose the argument.
Why would I bother attacking an argument that has nothing to do with any of my problems, and don’t particuarly disagree with 90% of? I just seem to be stuck trying to get you to actually deal with what was said, rather than what you think should be said.
And actually, Mick, I doubt you could cite three instances of me “exploding” at anyone on my own threads. I was slightly short with a dude on thread on Scotland a bit back but even that was a long way from “explosion”. You have also accused me in the past of serially censoring but I doubt you could find many instances of me censoring much beyond some man playing in my own threads either. But hey, post entirely on your prejudices if you wish.
Whether you deserve to or not.
Your big problem there, is that you somehow think I give a stuff about “winning”.
Maybe you just need to be clearer about what you are objecting to?
Mick
Maybe you just need to be clearer about what you are objecting to?
After 3 pages, are you serious?
After three pages? Yes. Very. Is it too many hyperlinks, or too much of Pete (as you explicitly state in the middle of this thread)?
I’m only interested in engaging with the former. I’m not remotely interested in the latter.
Actually, Mick, I didn’t state anything approaching that. But then, people here what they want to hear.
It’s about readability. The hyperlinks are a component of that. If you use too many it can get visually confusing. Using them with ironic asides can be a useful spur to have the reader investigate further, but use too many and you will have precisely the opposite affect. You can also use them to create pieces which really require further reading rather than stand on their own. I do not like this in general, but perhaps a case can be made. But you need to be clear what it is you are missing, and highlight the important bits. If you have an argument, you need to make sure the threa dof it is not lost. A scattergun will not do this, and again it will harm the piece rather than help.
This is reinforced by the recursive power of the internet. If one byzantine post leads to another, then another, the reader can get intimidated, bored or frustrated – the number of links will and possible paths will explode very rapidly. People do not have time to read them all. To be an tool, you must in someway boil things down from the universe of everything to a narrower subset. Yes, you want to allow exploration, but you also want a path available and an easy way to home back to it if you get lost. A forest park, rather than a jungle.
Pete sometimes seems to try and fit as many back references into a piece as he posisbly can. I’m sure it is a fun intellectual exercise, but it does nothing for the reader and can cause harm when taken to extreme. I am simply suggesting some consideration for the reader is appropriate – do I need every link? Does this read well, does it scan well? Does it read better if some is pulled out, or pulled to footnotes? Does the link make things clearer or more confused? Is it better off pulled into the piece itself rather than left as a link?
That can be done within the constraints of style and content. It is not a big point, but it is an important one, because there is capacity for immense annoyance when done wrong. That is indepenent of the dislike of politics or manner of anyone.
Has anyone coined the term Linkerbator? I want to, you heard it here first.
Mick I guess you’re finished on this thread now but seriously, how can you not get this? Ken, TS and Gonzo (amongst others) have laid this out very well. It’s disappointing that you can’t see this.
Hi folks. You’ll all have noticed this site is one of the slowest on the net. I downloaded the CCleaner program last week and its alsolute magic. Slugger loads in a second, well 2 seconds. I’ve linked to the home page where you can donate through pay-pal should you wish to, however if you wish to simply get the free download hit the other links and way you go.
Its a super wee program for speading up your browsing and removes alot of gunk.
Sad fact is that links may be to gospel or a foreign based billionaire’s Book of Lies.
And it has been particularly notable that, for example, the Dully Maul’s article on Enoch Powell and his rivers of blood speech has been “updated” – changing sufficient that it’s meaning is . . . shall we say . . “refined” to exclude significant facts.
WIKI is regularly updated to suit people from Rantzen to Chameleon too.