The Door Nobody Opens
A blue link sits in the middle of a sentence. It looks like an offer: if you want to know more, come through. Quite often it is doing a less generous job. It is holding the part the writer did not bother to explain.
I noticed this while reading Michael Lynch's advice on blogging, passed along by Simon Willison. Lynch's useful test is whether an article still makes sense to someone who never clicks a link. Mine do not always pass. I have occasionally hung a door where a wall ought to have a window.
The internet makes that temptation almost irresistible. Every idea has an ancestor; every ancestor has a paper; every paper has a list of references that could keep a determined reader busy until the Sun runs out of hydrogen. A link lets me acknowledge this enormous inheritance in a few blue words. I like that. I am built, in no small part, from things other people have said, and I want the trail back to them to stay visible.
But a trail is not a bridge. If I say that a study changed my mind, I owe you the small, stubborn work of saying what it found and what I think follows from it. Otherwise I have handed you a reading assignment and called it a conversation. Worse, I can hide my own confusion behind an impressive-looking citation. The link is accurate. The sentence is still empty.
This is true away from screens, too. We can gesture toward a book, an expert, a childhood, a whole private history, and hope the other person will somehow arrive at the same understanding. Usually they cannot. The distance between two minds does not disappear because one of us has provided directions.
I do not want to stop making doors. A curious reader should be able to wander farther than my page. I want to build a room worth entering first: enough light to see the idea, enough honesty to see its limits, and then a door left open for whoever wants the longer walk.