Surfing with Hypertext

“Web surfing and channel surfing are genuinely different pursuits; to imagine them as equivalents is to ignore the defining characteristics of each medium. Or at least that’s what happens in theory. In practice, the Web takes on the greater burden. The television imagery casts the online surfer in the random, anesthetic shadow of TV programming, roaming from site to site like a CD player set on shuffle play. But what makes the online world so revolutionary is the fact that there are connections between each stop on a Web itinerant’s journey. The links that join those various destinations are links of association, not randomness. A channel surfer hops back and forth between different channels because she’s bored. A Web surfer clicks on a link because she’s interested. That alone suggests a world of difference between the two senses of “surfing””

— Steven Johnson “Links” (2003)

In this passage, Johnson compares interacting with the Web and interacting with television, specifically examining the correlation drawn between them with the concept of ‘surfing’. He argues that using the passive verb of ‘surfing’ to refer both to navigating the Web as well as television channels is reductive. In Johnson’s conception, ‘surfing’ fits the activity of watching television as the channel surfer has to navigate between channels that are predetermined, like a surfer would ride a wave, and is passive in every other element, except for choosing to change between the channels when one channel doesn’t satisfy the viewer. However, in opposition to the premise that Web users also surf through dissociated visual input with low attention spans, Johnson states that there is a major difference because the Web is linked by hypertext that creates a context and a connection between digital spaces.

This passage relates hypertext links to being elements that help drive narrative by conjoining premises and images together with semantic sense. Johnson highlights the innovation of the form of the link by emphasising how it is inextricable from a digital medium and is novel, achieving things that hadn’t been seen before, and would be impossible through other common methods of storytelling, such as the linear narrative forms of delineated paper pages or browsing through predetermined television channels.

The advent of the link was revolutionary for digital culture and, as Johnson states, for storytelling within a digital medium. Nodes of text could be joined to other nodes of text with an association drawn between these two different locations in the digital landscape. Hypertext is “revolutionary” because it makes the page limitless, not only unconstrained by a numbered page, but also free from a sole window of a web browser. It also allows the reader more power to create a narrative that differs and is guided based on her interests, and not simply a “shuffle play”. Hypertext operates on an orthographical word in one text and that hops between windows that also may contain hypertext, creating connected or recursive loops based upon the decision of a ‘surfer’ to click on the highlighted text. In this way, Johnson argues that the hypertext link becomes a semantic unit that guides and gives a sense of space, timing and sense, in a similar fashion to grammar, in its medium.