It’s not issues of credibility, readability or connectivity in links that are tripping me up, but rather that I associate the entire Internet in general with action. If I’m on it, then I’m supposed to be communicating, researching, writing, or otherwise “working.” (Reading seems to happen better, as you pointed out, in a more closed environment (i.e., book or iPad or Kindle) at a remove from the Internet, where one feels the “permission” to relax.) Links are nothing to me online compared to the other demands for my attention — my email inbox being the biggest.

I think, as you pointed out, deep reading on the Internet takes self-discipline and training. Sometimes I can do it, sometimes I can’t. I have found that shutting down the browser for blocks of time or walking away from the computer entirely help my ability to concentrate and absorb information.

I’d just like to say that there is (sort of) precedence for this sort of thing – scientific papers. These have to have many footnotes, providing evidence for the claims asserted. They are often flagged as subscript or superscript numbers, very much like the hyperlink in that it supposedly breaks the flow of reading. In fact these flags are probably worse than hyperlinks because to ‘click-through’ to the original article you have to find the referenced footnote at the end of the article and look it up (online or at a library). This is required in published papers, as (rightly) evidence is needed to back up your statements.

I find it hard to believe that ‘linking’ in such a way detracts from the reading of the article – scientific papers are the bedrock of all amazing science that has been done for centuries.

I’m not sure there’s a reconciliation of that, just as I’m not sure there is of this discussion. Links matter, but I think really what Carr is getting at is how many links are too many, and how many are just enough – and maybe that’s the point of this discussion in the end.

Nice post though.

Simply change your CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) so the hyperlinks in your stories are invisible, unless they are hovered over.

Then your readers are not distracted by the existence of links, but can find them if they choose to dig. You retain context, you retain credibility, and you make for a smoother, uninterrupted reading experience.

Try it for a while, with a few articles, then benchmark that against a control group.

And Jimmy’s point gets us right back to staring at the central dilemma: The “credibility” links are at the bottom of Wikipedia articles, and as a daily Wikipedia reader I’ve been trained to know that and read accordingly — I sometimes jump down to the externals when the top of an article has given me the quick gloss I need.

Yet it’s also true that all the other links in those articles become a huge temptation — you can arrive to find out about, say, British warship classifications and find yourself reading about Phoenician trade with startling speed. (Not a theoretical example — happened to me last week.) Which is fascinating and wonderful — and it’s difficult to imagine Wikipedia without those links — but also gets right to Carr’s point about extra cognitive load. It takes a very disciplined reader to follow an article’s throughline and not race off to explore some other intellectual branch.

Maybe we are learning to read differently in different contexts, and our kids will scoff at the idea that we struggled with this. Maybe there’s some new way of presenting links that would preserve credibility and connectivity while enhancing readability, and will work for readers who aren’t inclined to mess around under the hood of the browser….

I took more than the usual criticism for my suggestion that “unbuilding the web” would be a better name for Carr’s project in the two pieces of his that you point to here. Well, it was a bit hyperbolic of me, and that’s never a good business for a critic to be in. On reflection, what I should have done is pointed out that Carr is asking to be understood in two different ways, but only defending one. When doubters react to the other, he charges them with over-reacting.

As you pointed here, if you don’t want to be misunderstood as suggesting we can do without links, why would you use “Experiments in delinkification” as your title, when what you really mean is not delinkifying a post, but disembedding the links and moving them around to enhance readability? Wouldn’t a term like that–delinkify–just cause unnecessary confusion?

Similarly, if what you really mean is… “Steve Gillmor was wrong to stop putting links into his online writing and to go on a crusade against them, because that would be unbuilding the web…” (which, as far as I can tell, is the position Carr actually holds, though I could be wrong) then why would you begin your sketch of that position by declaring a great deal of sympathy for Gillmor’s crusade? As in… “I’m beginning to think I should have joined up instead of mocking it,” which is what Nick wrote.

As far as I can tell, Carr does not actually think this. He doesn’t want to join up with Gillmor’s crusade to stop linking out in online writing. He just says it that way, because…. well, I won’t speculate on the because part, since I don’t know.

I’m pretty sure if my actual view was that Steve Gillmor went too far in cleansing his writing of links, I wouldn’t say, “maybe I should have joined his crusade.” That would be confusing. I would say something like, “I still think Gillmor was nuts to do away with links in his own writing, but he got me thinking about something….” That would be clearer. But it would sound less contrarian.

At Wikipedia, the external links – the ones for credibility – are placed at the bottom, just as Carr would suggest.