Concerning the nature of the World Wide Web and hypertext essays
When one complains that people on the internet are collating links to multiple documents and suggesting relationships between those documents unforeseen by the original writers, or when one is dismayed that something posted to the World Wide Web can garner a world's worth of readers and commenters, I confess that I am put in mind of someone complaining that telephones put distant noises right in the ear. It is not hyperbole to say that Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web precisely to do those things.* If you wish to prevent large numbers of unknowns from reading or responding to what you have written, if you do not want people to be able to compare and contrast your work with other work to which you have not deliberately contributed, I advise you to choose a medium other than the World Wide Web in which to publish.
In the other direction, when one reads an essay, monograph, or other persuasive writing with hypertext references to other documents, it is generally useful to at least briefly review the documents so linked. The writer of the first document is using the referenced documents to explain things to you: to give you additional background on the subject under discussion, to read counterarguments to her own argument, to incorporate other documents by reference (i.e. the document before you is to be read as if the document so incorporated has been cut and pasted into the document before you.) When you skip this larger context, context that the author has deliberately brought to your attention, you've lost a significant amount of what the author attempted to communicate to you. To my mind, this is a bit like reading a mystery by skipping a chapter whenever you have to put the book down. If, at the end, one doesn't understand the motives, means, or opportunity of the murderer to kill their victim, it is probably because one skipped over just such crucial information.
*(In fact, the ways in which Tim Berners-Lee's vision have not yet been completely implemented are that he would like for computer programs to collate the links between documents, other files, facts, or people [the semantic web is a pipe dream until computers have way fuzzier logic, but that's what he wants], and, at least when he first created the web, he would have liked it if people viewing your documents could amend them in situ, as opposed to merely replying to them. I don't know if the actual practice of wikis has changed his mind on this point.)
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In the other direction, when one reads an essay, monograph, or other persuasive writing with hypertext references to other documents, it is generally useful to at least briefly review the documents so linked. The writer of the first document is using the referenced documents to explain things to you: to give you additional background on the subject under discussion, to read counterarguments to her own argument, to incorporate other documents by reference (i.e. the document before you is to be read as if the document so incorporated has been cut and pasted into the document before you.) When you skip this larger context, context that the author has deliberately brought to your attention, you've lost a significant amount of what the author attempted to communicate to you. To my mind, this is a bit like reading a mystery by skipping a chapter whenever you have to put the book down. If, at the end, one doesn't understand the motives, means, or opportunity of the murderer to kill their victim, it is probably because one skipped over just such crucial information.
*(In fact, the ways in which Tim Berners-Lee's vision have not yet been completely implemented are that he would like for computer programs to collate the links between documents, other files, facts, or people [the semantic web is a pipe dream until computers have way fuzzier logic, but that's what he wants], and, at least when he first created the web, he would have liked it if people viewing your documents could amend them in situ, as opposed to merely replying to them. I don't know if the actual practice of wikis has changed his mind on this point.)
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.