We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. So it’s pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And what’s at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?
In this era, prominent philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, debated the extent to which a person controls the succession of ideas that appears in her mind. They posited that the succession of ideas reflects the interaction between the data received from the senses and one’s mental faculties – reason and imagination. Subsequently, David Hume argued that all successive ideas are linked by association.
"The mind follows connections found in the world."
The article has a section on Pope's Dunciad as an early example of hypterxtual writing. It's been a long time since I read it -- but I must have read one of the earlier versions, because I don't remember quite so many annotations and footnotes.
There's also this article that includes in which the term
hypertext
is coined:material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.
There's also this early concept for a browser called Xanadu:
If you quote a writer in text, then that text should link to the original document, and the reader should be able to view the quoting document and the original side by side, much as Bush envisioned for the layout of the memex. Nelson in a sense imagined a universal version of Pope’s Dunciad – a history of human thought in which the user could trace how lines and phrases moved from one work to another.
It reminds me a little of how hovering on an SN link brings up a brief window of the link's meta data.
[Here are 20 ways you will die young](example.com)
[Lorum Ipsum](example.com)