So, Where Do You Stand on the Issue of Delinkification?

Many years ago I worked with an editor who insisted I remove all my links from the stories I wrote. Put them at the bottom of the story, she said, or in a sidebar next to it. Stories with no links? I did it, but I thought she was crazy not to take full advantage of this amazing feature called the link throughout the entire story.

Well, guess what? Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize she was right. Sometimes it’s best to write your story, have your say, then let the reader loose at the end. There are exceptions. But, for the most part, putting links at the end of a story can work better than sprinkling them throughout a story. This point was made in a recent post by Nicholas Carr in his blog Rough Type. Carr is the author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, which makes the case that if the brain is shaped by the tools we use, then by using the web we might be reducing our ability to read and think deeply. In his article “Experiments in delinkification,” he says links in the body of a story or article are generally just a series of distractions, “little textual gnats buzzing around your head.”

Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension. The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank.

What’s interesting is the reaction generated by the article. After the article was written, Carr added an update say that the “Self-Appointed Defenders of Web Orthodoxy” have accused him of wanting to “unbuild the web.” That is followed by a series of mostly thoughtful comments from readers wondering how the link-only-at-the-bottom strategy might affect his web statistics for things like time spent on page or how it might affect his search engine optimization. All good questions. And now this article, like Carr’s original article and many of the other articles citing Carr’s original, will provide you with the links at the bottom.

Related articles by Zemanta: