The Hyperlink Delusion
A personal statement to upgrade the Web.
The design of the Web
We browse the Web, jumping from page to page using links as portals.

All the pieces of information scattered across the Web are interconnected through links. From static web pages with links in the form of blue underlined words that change the cursor of your mouse to a tiny hand when you roll over them, into dynamic pages with links of all imaginable forms and flavors.

Both the content and the use we have made of the World Wide Web have changed very quickly, but the underlying design remains the same, more than 30 years after the official date of its invention.

On a macro scale, looking at human evolution, the Web and the technologies that provided the foundations for the Web to exist are in their infancy, or as Jaron Lanier likes to put it out, “we are toddlers” [1]. I coincide with Lanier’s line of thought. There is plenty of room to grow and improve what we know as the Web, as we are starting to understand what becoming a digital society means and implies.

1.
“I think we are at the beginning of the beginning here. I think we are starting to really understand how computing can work in our lives and in civilization, we dive to it before with nothing but naivety and optimism and we are growing up, we are toddlers.” Jaron Lanier on ideas for the future, interviewed at The Vergecast. (03:14)
Jaron Lanier’s ideas for the future of profiting from your own data - The Verge