It's in its click.


I'm tempted to call it "love at first click", but that phrase shows up almost 300,000 times via a Google search, and it appears that the vast majority of them either tell us about the start of an internet initiated love affair, or advertise an online dating service. Here as well, Steve Johnson (again from Interface Culture, but there's an online article which is a version of much of Johnson's chapter on links) was able to capture the feeling:
Ask any Web user to recall what first lured him into cyberspace; you're not likely to hear rhapsodic descriptions of a twirling animated graphic or a thin, distorted sound clip. No, the eureka moment for most of us came when we first clicked on a link, and found ourselves jettisoned across the planet. The freedom and immediacy of that movement - shuttling from site to site across the infosphere, following trails of thought wherever they led us - was genuinely unlike anything before it. We'd seen more lively cartoon animations on Saturday-morning television; we'd heard more compelling audio piped out of our home stereos. But nothing could compare to that first link.
I know that not everyone finds that simple activity as fascinating as I do, but just the same, for me there was, and still is, a sense of magic in the wonderful simplicity of the link.



Go to: The joys of a clean slate, or
Go to: Dr. Hierarchy and Mr. Associative