Hyperlinks…
…are killing reference books, a sweeping generalization for the day. Have you ever tried to get through the day without a sweeping generalization? That is so old school, like opening an unabridged Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary - which I still do, occasionally. I bought my copy some years ago at a clearance sale for yet another dying independent bookstore. A different sort of endangered species. The 21st century marches on.
I have always had an advanced case of the Enclyclopedia Disease, unable to simply look up one topic. Flipping through pages looking for congress, I would pause at aardvark, or sometimes make it as far as camera obscura. The same thing would happen with dictionaries, or thesauruses, or Bartlett’s Quotations.
Then came the internet, closely followed by the World Wide Web and those ultimate diversions of purpose, hyperlinks. Like the Enterprise hyperjumping entire galaxies at warp 5, I could now follow an infinite branching network of paths into the densest thickets of information. Sitting down to my computer early in the evening, I might find myself still at the keyboard in the small hours of the morning, eyes grainy, mouse hand cramping badly, my mind growing numb from information overload.
I am getting better. Or age is forcing restraint where once was only appetite. But…what was that link I saw on Facebook a little while ago…
Stop me before I click again, somebody, please! Lead me back to my bookshelves. Save print media, the next casualty of technology.
