Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Hyperlinked society
A cool-looking conference at the Annenberg School this weekend....
Most internet users know hyperlinks as highlighted words on a web page that take them to certain other sites. But hyperlinks today are quite complex forms of instant connectionâ€â€for example, tags, API mashups, and RSS feeds. Moreover, media convergence has led to increased instant linking among desktop computers, cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital video recorders, and even billboards.
Through these activities and far more, “links†are becoming the basic forces that relate creative works to one another. Links nominate what ideas and actors have the right to
be heard and with what priority. Various stakeholders in society recognize the political and economic value of these connections. Governments, corporations, non-profits and individual media users often work to digitally privilege certain ideas over others.
Do links encourage people to see beyond their personal situations and know the broad world in diverse ways? Or, instead, do links encourage people to drill into their own territories and not learn about social concerns that seem irrelevant to their personal interests? What roles do economic and political considerations play in creating links that nudge people in one or the other direction?
The notion of links "becoming the basic forces that relate creative works to one another," and helping to define "what ideas and actors have the right to be heard and with what priority" strikes me as right on (it has strong echoes of actor-network theory, a branch of science studies that I've drawn on in my own work).
It does make me wonder, to what degree has the character of hyperlinks influenced the way we've thought about cyberspace? Way back when, hyperlinks were Really Cool: I still remember how much time I lavished on them when, as an instructor at UC Davis, I put together my first course Web site.
It also seems to me that there's a growing serious interest in charting the cognitive impacts of new media: Susan Greenfield's recent speech calling for more study of the relationship between new technology and our brains seems to have crystallized something.