Monday, August 30, 2010

Rosenberg on Carr on links

In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification: [...] Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article’s links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I’m unfamiliar. [...] So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link.

Scott Rosenberg is too polite to suggest a more cynical reason for Carr's anti-link obfuscation: it's the latest episode in Carr's profitable series as Web-critic-on-call. Nevertheless, Rosenberg's piece is very worth reading especially for how it takes apart Carr's misleading "studies show" appeal to scientific authority. I'm dreaming of a new blog called Studies Do Not Show with Rosenberg, Mark Liberman, Andrew Gelman, and Cosma Shalizi as founding contributors...

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