A clear and ever-present danger.


It's easy - too easy - to get carried away, and to let each detail have its own link. When this happens I often mind myself starting to report on everything that happens to me. It may be that this is less a problem that stems from hypertext than one that stems simply from the availability of the World Wide Web - the possibility of a vast audience (and the probably over-exaggerated belief that someone might want to read what we're writing), makes too many of us want to tell all. But even if that vast yet elusive readership may be the more central reason for web pages that report every detail of what are ultimately (to this reader, at least) quite boring lives, I'm quite sure that the ability to link at will to just about anything also bears some of the blame. Anyone who has spent more time that he or she would ever have imagined possible reading the lists of what people eat for breakfast each day, or the restaurants they've visited, or the CDs they've bought and the books they've read, and even the brands of toothpaste they've tried is aware of what a real, and often distressing, problem this is.



Go to: The (ir)relevance of hypertext