The Ethiopians... didn't they whip the Italians in WWII? So you wander over to the Ethiopian homepage for quick look...
"Scandalous exploitation! The Ethiopians are perhaps..." and an invitation to look at the tragedy of the workers' lot in Ethiopia, as revealed in this deftly-constructed labor statistics chart. The more you examine the figures, the more bummed you feel. It's monstrous that....
Wait a minute!
90 seconds ago you set out to find out some background information about Cuddles. Now you're pouring over the heart-rending numbers that reveal the exploitation and misery of the Ethiopians, as revealed in the charts.
What happened?
You overlinked.
Writers are beginning to worry collectively over their "loss of authorial control" on the World-Wide Web -- a loss exemplified in the Ethiopian Labor Statistics odyssey. At first, it seemed that publishing on the Web was a great liberator, an expansion of possibilities for writer and reader alike. If I'm writing a piece on Native American coyote myths, I don't have to do all the writing -- or assume all the risk of incurring the wrath of Amerindians who might resent Euro "explanations" of their stories as a post-modern re-invasion and occupation of their spiritual territory. I can simple write:
Click <A HREF="http://www.ucsc.edu/costano/""> here </A> to find out about the Ohlone culture in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Intellectually, it feels righteous to make the link. You let the Ohlones themselves do the explaining. You let yourself off the moral hook (and off the job of research and writing), while handing over the speaker's podium to a group that demands it by birthright.
You're distributed. You're spreading out the task of composing a piece among one or several other agencies, who probably know more about the subject than you do. You're part of the post-modern phenomenon of abandoning the authoritative voice by relinquishing part of the authorship to other parties. You're participating in multiplexed composition, and, by making other folks' work available through the courtesy of hyperlink, you create a new kind of extended community of interest across the web.
But sometimes this feeling of expansion doesn't feel quite so exhilarating.
Why did he think that adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.
Philip Larkin's lines were a meditation on having children. But, applied here, they draw our attention us to the central loss incurred by distributing our authorship across the www to other writers on other sites. Once writers bluemark a word or an an idea as a link to another site, they run multiple risks:
And yet .... a www document with no links seems barren, a dead end street, with no place to go but BACK. Your reader may well feel the same frustration that an art gallery visitors feels when they wander from the Impressionist Gallery into the Contemporary Artists niche, only to find "NO EXIT" at the end, then grudgingly re-traverse the visited galleries at an impatient clip. They wanted a link out, not a retreat through space.
What's the answer? Dead end, or risk of readership wandering off into the multi-linked wwwilderness? Within your own pages, of course, you have the option -- and ought to use that option -- of putting in statement such as:
Click <A HREF="Cuddles2.html"> here </A> to return to the text
after sending the readers to other sections of your page. And if we must, or feel we must, send our readers out to a linked document, there ought to be a way to beam them a message:
Now that you've read about the Abyssinian cats, click <A HREF= "Cuddles.2" IMG SRC= "images/ratcatchers/Cuddles.gif"> on this cat <A> to go back to the main narrative.
If we can't get in that last plea to return to our authorial domain, then the readers are abandoned to the endless web. Their meanderings may give them passing pleasure, may provide an hour's diversion. But they have lost the cat yarn. They fall victim to the inherent trap of all netsurfing and web-browsing without a central purpose:
Incoherence.
-- Arthur Chandler
-- September, 1995