Last weekend, I went out-of-town, and thanks to the reach of the AT&T network - which apparently covers neither San Francisco, nor downtown Eugene, nor the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington -- I was away from the Internet for four days. In the world of a tech blogger, that's an eternity. As much of my day involves research and reading, I came back to an overflowing feedreader, and after a valiant attempt at catching up, I won't lie, I just hit "Mark All Read."
In being offline and out-of-the-loop, I missed Nicholas Carr's post "Experiments in delinkification."
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I wrote one blog post from the backseat of our van, in the parking lot at some little state park along the river. I couldn't do my normal work -- amassing links, making references -- so I had to write a post based on my own knowledge, rather than on the citation of others' knowledge. It was alright, not my best work by any means. But it was Memorial Day, I was at Sasquatch, and there you have it. Marshall called me on it later, in part because the post was rife with typos, but in part because he said I hadn't included enough links (on the same day, funnily enough, that he wrote a response to Carr's call for delinkification).
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When I taught College Composition, I spent one class devoted entirely to the ideas of attribution -- not that it stopped the flurry of plagiarized essays each term, alas. I taught my students when and how to use quotations in their essays. I gave them a nifty handout (ah, the days of handouts) that cited a writer's guide (shit, I can't remember the reference) who said (and yeah, I am paraphrasing), use a quotation when you want your reader to know your source and use a quotation when you want to give credit to another writer's words/ideas. Cite all quotations, I'd tell my students. Repeatedly. Copy the passage word-for-word, and put it in quotation marks. Give your reader all the pertinent bibliographic info (including page number) based on whatever style your editor/professor/discipline demands. Cite any facts or ideas that are not common knowledge. Cite your sources, cite your sources, cite your sources, I'd scrawl all over the margins of their papers.
I will often rail against many aspects of intellectual property. Indeed one of the first CSS elements I changed when I installed this new Wordpress Template was to remove the ©2010 All Rights Reserved language and replace it with the Creative Commons license below. And even though, in the spirit of the situationists, I'll often quote the Comte de Lautreamont ("Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it."), when it came to my writing students, I had no tolerance for plagiarism. It was a blend of an "It's the law" philosophy with "don't be so fucking lazy, please."
I last taught Writing 122 at the University of Oregon in 2003. My students struggled to remember to cite their sources. Would they be more apt to hyperlink? (I don't know. Educators, I'd be curious if so.)
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Carr says that the hyperlink is "a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank." Carr argues that links are distractions, and citational protocol aside, he says we pay a "cognitive penalty" for embedding these external references in our prose. This runs counter, I think, to what I'd tell my students: that their arguments paid an intellectual penalty without the inclusion of references.
As someone who's poured through many a text, flipping back-and-forth between the body and the references, with a finger stuck in the back of the book to follow along with the endnotes, perhaps I am just a faulty, distracted reader. I have always been apt to leave a text this way, to follow my research and reading down different paths. Before the Web, I just had to get off my ass and walk through the stacks to find the next book or journal. Now I just click a link.
And I haven't read the research (does Carr cite it?), so I dunno. Perhaps scholars do pay some sort of cognitive penalty as part of our training, and that's what makes us tend to write more like Judith Butler and less like Shel Silverstein.
Or perhaps writing and reading is no longer the purview of those who sit and read in quiet, uninterrupted contemplation -- monks come to mind here -- with an invariable, unalterable Text.