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laura miller of salon.com knows that 'looking good in pants' is new to the game. but that didn't stop her from calling us out today in a piece entitled "the hyperlink war," on how 'learning not to lean on links can make you a better writer.' you won't find a link to the piece until the end of this post, because i've decided to participate for the day in an experiment miller started to omit hyperlinks from the body sections of her web writing and collect them in an explanatory endnote paragraph instead.

miller's experiment was inspired by her reading the shallows by nicholas carr, a book that demonstrates how the split-second distractions available in abundance on the internet work on the plasticity of the brain to change how we process and recall information. filling up on references made by hyperlink apparently over stuffs our short term memories and makes it difficult to retain information in the long term. constantly skimming and reading in short form also appear to make "deep" reading, of the unbroken literary sort, more difficult. in a nutshell, the internet is developing people some concentration problems (bear with me, i can't seem to write without linking to anything).

today's article, however, wasn't so much on the findings of carr's book as on how removing links from our internet writing makes for writing of higher quality. i very much agree that linking to source material instead of taking the time to lay out and support an argument can be conducive to sloppy writing. as regards nonfiction web journalism in particular, it's surely no onus for a writer to completely and intentionally articulate her take on a subject. rather, it's to be expected. and if she can do that without also embedding constant distractions into her writing, she can maybe help us all finish war and peace as well.

the thing is, some people (me and a few friends) already read long form works of well written literature and journalism that are free of hyperlinks. and that's because they're not on the internet. does some online writing suffer from relying too much on linking and interactivity? sure. but the techie extras available to web writers allow us to produce writing of a unique sort, writing with a visual intertextuality (and a sustained and documented intertextuality in the case of the weblog) that is special to the internet. as miller acknowledges, "a sentence that's written to include hyperlinks won't necessarily make as much sense without them." so maybe the problem to be addressed isn't internet reading but the proliferation of new devices that have more and more readers reading at an electronic interface most of the time. the question should be one of time and place rather than of if at all.

but then there's that bane of the "serious" web writer: cleverness. for some sentences, it's not just clarity that's lost when their links are removed, but their basic raison d'être as entertainment. cheekiness doesn't seem to cut it for everyone, though: a colleague of miller's "conveyed her reservations about jokey links that don't really add anything to a story; they strike her as 'lazy,' an inconvenience to readers who are prodded to check out how clever the writer is."

[expletive]

for miller herself, "doing without [hyperlinks] forces you to think harder about whether that reference is as cool or funny as you think it is." oh, it is, laura. it is. maybe someone's just having a hard time keeping up. since i'm going along with the experiment and wasn't able to link to anything there, i'll tell a joke:

knock, knock. who's there? to. to who? to WHOM!

also, i'm under the impression that linking around to popular sites will help my search engine something or other. without the links, i have to rely on dubious post titles. ms. miller, after you read this, please kindly put a link to 'looking good in pants' at salon.com. i think it's only fair since i've featured you (and will link to your article in just a bit) on the most popular personal weblog on the internet.

referenced in this article: "the hyperlink war" by laura miller. you can read her review of the shallows here or check out the book at powell's. now that i've taught you how to read again, try war and peace.