Jackson's Ephemera

In the Age of Content, hyperlinks are the internet’s connective tissue. Websites that do content well employ them strategically to create an immersive network of information, with the end goal of maximising users’ time on site and, more often than not, funnelling them toward a point of sale.

There’s a surprisingly sophisticated form of information architecture involved in linking content to such an effect. Properly done, it involves auditing and mapping the existing content of a website in a brainstorm-ish diagram, identifying topics that should be hyperlinked but aren’t, and planning future content that links to one or more of those topics. On a large corporate website that might span thousands of pages, this is a seriously involved process.

On a personal site such as this one, it’s not really a concern. I have nothing to gain – commercially anyway – by encouraging people to stay on here longer than they wish. But maybe hyperlinking and content architecture have some application beyond digital marketing.

What’s remarkable about the hyperlink is its ability to create a singular body of work across multiple subjects and spaces. A humble blog post, for example, can be part of a network of hyperlinked articles that might even exist across multiple websites, making it just one part of an enormous text that is constantly being updated and added to. Beyond marketing, the power of these hyperlinked texts is at work on news sites where each article links out to any number of associated headlines, and Wikipedia, where readers have even made a game of jumping from one random topic to another via internal links alone. But what would happen if we applied the potential of hyperlinks to imagined worlds, instead of informational ones?

Wikipedia tells me that Hypertext Fiction is not a new concept, but I think the hyperlink itself opens up new possibilities for non-linear narratives beyond a digital ‘choose your own adventure’ sort of thing. Instead it could create entire open worlds in which stories might unfold or not, characters may or may not be met, and each new reader becomes an explorer in search of undiscovered settings.

Much like the user journey on a well-planned commercial blog, the reading experience would be intuitive, even unconscious. Without knowing it, different readers would take different paths; some going deep into the details linked off their entry point, others travelling sideways to adjacent narratives, still others moving upwards into umbrella categories that lay foundations for the stories below. Different corners of the text would become self-contained ecosystems of hyperlinked content, leading some readers to rove between them, and others to confine themselves in the interests of specialised study or understanding.

In this sense it is a text a lot like life. Reading it is a lot like living. And maybe, with enough time and enough detail, we would not even be able to tell the two apart.