Why do so many people write the same thing over and over again? Partly it's because simply linking to somebody else's text is still a bit difficult, and still somewhat frowned upon. We're still expected to make novel and original contributions to a subject that frequently has already had everything significant said about it. It's not that we purposefully copy, but that we simply don't have anything original to say. Another reason is what I call Hurvitz's Law of the Use of Information, which claims that 95% of all activity connected to information is devoted to moving it from one place to another. Perhaps only 5% is devoted to actually generating something original from that information.

But another reason must be considered as well. Writing is, after all, a concretization of thinking. We write in order to make sense of what is going on around us. We try things on to see if they fit. Before the internet we did this in our own notebooks, and sometimes transferred their contents to the typed page in order to show our teachers (professors?) that we actually understood what we were supposed to be learning. Rarely did these texts become accessible to a wider audience than their author or a limited group of readers. But with the advent of the World Wide Web people started concretizing their thoughts in the public sphere. Thinking outloud became, almost seamlessly, thinking in public. The authors were, perhaps, mostly trying to make sense to themselves, but they were allowing others to witness the process. Even if they didn't really intend or expect to be read, the act of posting those concretized thoughts brought along with it the possibility of an actual readership. Thus, instead of asking why so many people seem to be saying the same thing perhaps we should simply recognize that the time is ripe for certain thoughts to gain concrete expression.

These thoughts probably hold true in almost any topic under discussion, but they do so even more so with a topic like the uses of hypertext, simply because the topic invites experimentation and the best place for those experiments is on the web where others can get a taste of what's been tried.

But give me less as well.

Go to: Should I quote them all?, or
Go to: Prove you're not making all this up