It all starts on Wikipedia. Maybe you look up, say, the men's marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics. (Which, if you haven't, I'd highly recommend.) That leads you to a Smithsonian article about the "strangest" marathon ever. The games that year were tied to the St. Louis World's Fair, and all of a sudden you're reading about that, then about world's fairs in general, then about their influence on urban planning, then about lakefront parks in Chicago, and before you know it, you've lost your sense of time and the sun has gone down. This is a time-honored pastime I'm guessing most of us know well: the internet rabbit hole.
At this point, clicking from link to link to read a sequence of stories is a fixture of life on the internet. For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people also thought that stories might be written this way. Some techno-optimists became convinced that hypertext—"a branching path of overlapping narratives and detours that the reader navigated through the then-novel convention of clicking on textual links"—would be the future of fiction.
That's not how it happened, of course. But in his 2013 ode to the bygone form, "Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story," writer Steven Johnson argues that a version of these stories has proliferated in exactly the way I've described. As readers click from link to link, from blog to article to Twitter thread and back again, they construct their own hypertextual narratives. "Each landing point along that itinerary is a linear piece, designed to be read from start to finish. But the constellation they form is something else," Johnson writes. "Hypertext turned out to be a brilliant medium for bundling a collection of linear stories or arguments written by different people."
In a way, then, the lost art of hypertext persists in each of our digital lives, every day and all the time. What was the last truly great internet rabbit hole you fell down? What sorts of unexpected places did it lead you? Let me know in the comments below the story.
See you next week!
.jpg "Tim Berners-Lee")
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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