There are, in essence, three ways you can navigate ‘in-text’ links:

  1. you can ignore them, in which case, there is no problem;
  2. you can click them one by one and read (or reject) the opened page before going ‘back’ to the main story, but this makes parsing the original narrative somewhat tricky;
  3. you can ctrl-click them all into new tabs and read them later, after finishing the piece you are currently reading.

If you’re of even a mildly obsessive compulsive sort, this latter approach is the most logical approach to the media form and you will do it without thinking – I often forget to click without my pinky on ctrl.

The problem with this, of course, is the disposition of bloggers and wiki authors to compulsively spot their posts with links to their friends and sources.  So almost every tab you open contains more in-text links and each ctrl-click spawns another tab. Before you know it, you are at the heart of a tabulation explosion – so many tabs, disappearing off into some hidden tab dimension like lemmings plunging into the North Atlantic.  My God – it’s full of tabs!

And what happens when you hit a rich vein of embedded video? Suddenly eight crossed streams of audio make your PC start behaving like a busy night in a city pub.  Clumsy arguments that could never occur in real normality spring up between face-planting skater-fools and too-cool conference rockstars. Suddenly you are off in a game of #4: Tab Hunting, trying to find them all and pause them before your brain implodes.

What will halt the incessant tabulation? Well, obviously, you will realise that it is in your power.  By then, however, it is too late – you almost certainly will have opened so many tabs that you’ll have no idea what they relate to when you eventually get to them.

You give up! You stop opening tabs and go back to doing something else, but you don’t close them – there might be something interesting in there. Cue four days of #1: Click Amnesia.

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2009/01/24 (Jan, Sat)

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