Quotes About Hyperlinks

the influence in the right-wing media ecosystem, whether judged by hyperlinks, Twitter sharing, or Facebook sharing, is both highly skewed to the far right and highly insulated from other segments of the network, from center-right (which is nearly nonexistent) through the far

By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the internet off.

The kind of intelligent book club discussion as now happens on the book sharing site Goodreads might follow the book itself and become more deeply embedded into the book via hyperlinks. So when a person cites a particular passage, a two-way link connects the comment to the passage and the passage to the comment. Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text.

Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching.

When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium's physical form; it injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.