Interface Culture – Links

A few quotes from the chapter about Links in Interface Culture:

“The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries.”

“As the word suggests, a link is a way of drawing connections between things, a way of forging semantic relationships. In the terminology of linguistics, the link plays a cunjunctive role, binding together disparate ideas in digital prose.”

“You can create a master list of all your favorite resources, but there’s no way to describe the relationships between them, the links of association that make that personal web intelligible to you.”

“Most Web browsers still dutifully follow the links that are served up to them, without any means of creating their own associative trails in return. The Web should be a way of seeing new relationships, connecting things that might have otherwise been kept seperate.”

“Reading an article about Apple Computer doesn’t make you want to check out its home page; it make you want to read other, related articles on the same topic, or zoom in on one particularly tantalizing idea, or click over to a reader discussion about the company’s future.”

“The slang evolves out of the way you string together information, the way you make you references, and not the words you use. If punctuation can become an element of slang (think scarequotes again), then why not links?”