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| Photo by mikael altemark. Some rights reserved. Source: Flickr |
This essay's going to be rather short, so I'll just cut to the chase. An awful habit is developing among the essays, articles, blogs, op-eds, or whatever you want to call them, on the Internet. Allow me to explain. Say you are reading an article about the history of the peanut butter and banana sandwich, when the author of said piece, claims that the popular dish was invented by Elvis Presley. Instead of detailing where they found this fact, or giving us the passage, they hyperlink the statement to their source. Confronted with this, you can either click on the hyperlink to verify the truth of their claim, or you can trust them to be honest and not bother. Of course, no one on the Internet can be trusted these days, so you click, but when to click? Do you click immediately and interrupt the flow of the article or wait until you finish the article, while it dangles among the sentences, tantalizing you. Eventually, when you do click, 9 times out of 10, you reach another Internet source, and 9 times out of 10, they'll have numerous claims where the hyperlinks abound. This eventually becomes a rather time consuming and irritating game, chasing source after source in search of the original. It may take hours, and by the time you finish, you may have forgotten what the original article was about.
I like to call the cat-and-mouse that many news junkies are familiar with, "link-surfing." Unfortunately, I can't say that I coined the term, because Urban Dictionary thought of it first, "link surfing: Traversing the Web by clicking on links within web pages. This technique is often used on encyclopedia sites like Wikipedia" (Gunderson). If only this habit could be regulated to websites like Wikipedia, but alas, it has infected the annals of our best magazines and newspapers. Since people prefer to get their information for free (I sure do) I imagine that much of the press is gearing themselves towards an Internet audience. As such, they no longer bother with quotes or paraphrases. You're expected to either follow the link or take them at face value. This, with all due respect, comes off as lazy. This type of format certainly isn't admissible for college papers or non-fiction Pulitzer Prize winners. I've always believed that a text should be self-contained. All the relevant information necessary to understanding the point of your piece should all be within the text itself. Your sources should be appendices to your arguments. Following all those links to verify the correctness of your claims is simply too much work for the average reader to do in one sitting. Some of us have lives outside of the Internet. We can't be bothered to go link-surfing all day. I don't know if these Internet writers actually expect us to click on all of their links. In a way, their professionalism is appears as not much different from the rumor mill.
By the way, I often find that some of these links are ultimately useless. They may lead to magazine that requires a subscription, or an academic study that requires a subscription, or an Error 404, or a Wikipedia article. Some of you may wonder why I listed the Wikipedia article as useless. Well, to its credit, the free encyclopedia has plenty of information and sources listed. In my opinion, the website's entries are only useful insofar as you are able to check their sources. Some require that you go to the library, while others are dead links or uncheckable. Checking the links, again, takes up too much time, and knowing that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, its claims deserve the highest scrutiny. Will we really be able to verify each and every claim? In other words, not a very reliable source.
This may sound a bit old-fashioned, but I call for an appeal to the past. I realize that not every single claim made needs to be referenced or footnoted, but the big ones do. For those big ones, don't cheapen yourself by only linking the words to another site. Quote or paraphrase it, like you were taught. If you can't find it on the Internet, then fine, source a book if you must. I understand that Internet connection has made information a lot easier to find, and that's a good thing. However, save the rest of us some time, and muscle up your arguments inside of the text, instead of relying solely on links, that frankly, most of us won't even bother to click on. Also, don't source Wikipedia. That makes you look like a slacker.
Bibliography
Gunderson, Bob. "link surfing." Urban Dictionary. May 1, 2007. Web. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=link%20surfing
