Over the years (again?) I've
bemoaned the retreat of the web from what would seem to me to be it's logical
associative "structure". I've gone as far as admitting that my vision
of the web has become little more than an historical artifact. Sometimes, after
a long day (or week) of encountering only straight and narrow links, I'm ready
to admit defeat. That being said, I also have to admit that there are times
when I see the hierarchical use of hypertext as totally legitimate. And not
just legitimate - I often use hierarchical
hypertext myself.
Cyberspace can be confusing. I've seen novices close to
tears when they first encounter Yahoo!'s main page (or the directory, which
seems, each time I click over to it to take
a glimpse, to take up less and less space on their main page). Why would I ever
want so many links, they seem to ask. And I suppose that we should admit the
truth - we really don't need them all. Nobody, after all, is really expected
to cover all of cyberspace. Each of us has his or her own small corner, and
if we get to know it well, we're satisfied. And, strange as it may seem upon
first glance, most of Yahoo!, and particularly the more traditional Yahoo! directory,
is purposefully hierarchical. The entire idea behind a catalog structure is
that we'll be able to find something within a given, predefined, and yes, there's
that word again, logical, framework. Precisely because it really is so easy
to get lost, navigational aids (somehow, the phrase itself seems to suggest,
perhaps even assume, the existence of a hierarchical
structure) are desirable.
A number of attempts have been made to make it easier for
the web surfer to navigate the reading experience.
It's nice to know that some web designers see this as an important service,
though Steven Johnson claims that the fact that advanced navigational tools
aren't built into the browser is a major shortcoming of web browser design.
John December, whom I've read pretty much since
I first started reading on the web, designed a number of simple, and basic,
buttons that he pastes into his texts after links. These
buttons identify for us what sort of link we've encountered, so that we
can decide, before clicking, whether we want to
follow it. But it's not only a question of the destinations to which various
links lead us, but also of the sort of reading experience that various navigational
tools imply.
Mark Bernstein in Patterns
of Hypertext suggests numerous possible narrative/navigational patterns.
A number of these (cycle, contour, counterpoint, tangle, sieve) he illustrates
with pleasant graphics. Bernstein's goal isn't to outfit us with aids that help
us identify where a link will lead us. Instead, he seeks to classify or categorize
various hypertextual narrative playing fields and in that way help us to understand
the different functions that a link can perform. He doesn't juxtapose associative
and hierarchical structures (he only mentions hierarchies when discussing sieves)
in order to choose sides, but to help us become more aware as readers. In a
manner somewhat similar to Bernstein, Nicholas C. Burbules in Rhetorics
of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy suggests various functions
that links in a text can perform, functions that may at first be taken for granted
but that critical readers should take note of. Among Burbules' categories we
find: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, antistasis and
more. Burbules' paper is from 1997, and it's my guess that I first read
it back when it was new. For some reason I remembered that, like Bernstein,
his paper had graphic representations (I learned long ago not
to expect links) of the different functions that links fulfill, but I discovered
that I was mistaken.
Somewhere along the line, basically with the rise of the
WWW, associative linking won out over hierarchic linking. Perhaps it wasn't
the associative linking that Bernstein and Burbules and others theorized about,
but it was certainly different from the menu-based systems that had been the
standards of an earlier internet. As a few commentators have noted, the now
almost totally defunct Gopher systems did an excellent
job of hierarchical organizing. Though the vast majority of internet users have
probably never heard the name Gopher, there are still some people who long for
those good old days. But the sheer simplicity of associative hypertext, our
ability to create a link within a document so that it jumps out at the reader
(or into his or her mind) precisely where we want it do, defeated Gopher hands
down. As has been proven true in numerous other contexts, too much success can
often lead to failure. Since that stunning victory, a victory that grew out
of the obviousness of associative linking within the web, that same associative
hypertext has been in retreat. As though it was embarrassed by such a complete
victory, associative linking has since then been busy apologizing, has been
limiting itself to "see also", and "reference" links. To
a large extent it has abandoned the central chunks of text that can be found
on a web page and has instead retreated into the margins, and has allowed hierarchical
menus to restake a claim on the page.
As should have become obvious even well before this point
in this column, I let my associations overtake me this time. More than overtaking
me, they seem to have taken over the entire column. I seem to recall that I
my original intent was to examine how my preparing of web-based information
is a constant struggle between two different and distinct approaches toward
linking - the associative and the hierarchical. But it appears that my associative
side wasn't interested in coexistence, and it pushed the hierarchical side almost
totally out of the picture. That being the case, it seems rather obvious why
I chose the associative aspect of my linking personality as
the doctor in my title.
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