Should we de-link hypertext?

A colleague sent me the link to an interesting post that disapproves (sort of) of links: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification. Excerpt:

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.

I've put Rough Type in the list of Webwriting Resources.

In my writing for The Tyee, I make a point of including hyperlinks to enrich the text, to give readers an extra dimension of information. (The link will take you to an example.)

And I increasingly find footnotes in print text to be "more violent": those tiny little superscript numbers tell me the real information is buried in the back of the book, but I'm too lazy to keep flipping back and forth. If I did flip to the back of the book, I'd find a reference to an unobtainable book or article—or to a URL that I would have to painstakingly type in to my computer. 

Talk about giving yourself a yank! By comparison, clicking through to a link is both easy and easily reversible—at least if the new material pops up in a new window, and the original item has some intrinsic interest to the reader.

Case in point: When I clicked through to Rough Type and started reading, I knew I was dealing with good stuff. I explored the site a little, made a link to it for Webwriting Resources, and went back to my colleague's email to thank him for letting me know about Nicholas Carr. I didn't wander off into the World Wide Labyrinth.

And now here I am, blogging about him and planning to spend more time exploring his site—wherever the hell he wants to put his links. Nicholas Carr is a guy worth knowing.

Comments

[Qpr]

Well, I guess Carr is a decent enough writer and does sometimes have interesting things to say, but on his current hobbyhorse I think he's way off base.

Case in point: His "studies show" desperately needs a link so that we can decide for ourselves whether those studies are to be trusted, and without such a link to validate its basic hypothesis, any "comprehension" of his post is illusory (which is worse than non-existent).

[Smsbookreviews.blogspot.com]

I didn't read the article but I do have that problem with clicking through links like crazy so that I sometimes never finish any of the articles I was trying to read. I do think we need links but I think they should be at the end. When a word or sentence in every paragraph is linked somewhere else, I won't get through your writing.

[Anna Siriano]

what I found most interesting as I read this article was that I didn't use your one hyperlink, but I did copy and paste "Rough Type" into my Google search bar. I generally read the whole article and them go back and link through anyways.

[Anna Siriano]

oh well I guess you linked to Rough Type anyways, but still that's what I did. haha.