Learn to love your links

If you're old enough to remember when the web was called the Information Highway, you may recall a site called Suck.com. It was an irreverent daily zine (remember those?) launched in the summer of 1995 with the irresistible inscription, "a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun."

Yet what I recall appreciating most about Suck was not its wit or originality, but something only a bona fide ink-stained wretch would notice: Its use of hyperlinks.

You see, for a Luddite who once literally pasted together "takes"--newspaper lingo for typewritten pages of a story--before sending them off to the typesetting pool at the L.A. Times, all this online stuff was quite liberating. Hyperlinks were a game-changer for reasons of perspective, structure, emphasis, and even ethics.

Suck, however, couldn't be bothered with such mundane considerations. It capitalized on linking for a very different purpose, to enhance its writing with a devastating combination of humor and sarcasm.

My favorite example of this understated practice was what I call the "punchline link." Case in point:

"Every day, we confront the strange brew of dread and anticipation that comes with sifting through the drift and drivel that's dumped into our mailboxes. The keepers, generally hand-scrawled hate mail, or the occasional scrap from a prison paramour, are as easy to spot as the garbage, which usually bears Ed McMahon's countenance like a royal crest."

If you followed the lone  link in this paean to junk mail, you saw that it pointed to the erstwhile Sharper Image. To me, Suck was the original master of this art.

Unfortunately, even in their relatively short lifespan, such clever and elegant use of hyperlinks is all but lost. Rather, they have become buried in the universal junkyard that passes for writing today. Worse still, they are forced into syntactic prostitution as advertised keywords.

There is a reason for this nostalgia, other than just the self-indulgence of middle age. It serves as a reminder of why this medium is so powerful for prose--and why we, with our Prussian writing objectives, feel compelled to infect others with our unhealthy obsession on points such as these:

• Context. For old-school journalists who insist on such nuisances as supporting their claims, hyperlinking is a perfect way to divulge the direct source of public information without spending time rewriting background material. It's good for readers too: Those who are already familiar with a topic aren't subjected to extraneous explanation, and those who want to know more can drill down through the linkage to their heart's content.
• Depth. For even moderately prolific writers, linking is an ideal way to strut your stuff. An archive of, say, 50 stories will produce a surprising number of opportunities to link back to previous articles in your database. This serves the dual purpose of providing context while underscoring your authority. (A third reason is ancillary traffic to your blog or site, but that's not the point here.)
• Impact. Links are like martinis. Served at appropriate intervals, they lubricate the pace of conversation as well as its participants. Neither, therefore, should be abused: If you overdo it--the links, that is--they will lose their effectiveness and, depending on one's browser settings, make the body of your text look like it has some kind of pigment disease. Remember, graphical disruptions are just as bad as verbal ones.
• Reference. Not long ago there was a debate in certain journo-wonky circles over the use of "retro" or "pop" terms and citations in stories. The complaint was that such references alienated younger and/or overseas readers who didn't grow up in the same culture as the aging and/or insensitive writer. My coward's solution: Use hyperlinks liberally. Not only does it forgive our literati indulgences (sort of), but it also dares to educate the uninitiated.
• Writing. As Suck shows, links adds a dimension of communication that is impossible to achieve in a book, newspaper, magazine, or other static medium, at least with such economy. (Like this.) Here, it is the equivalent of a visual but unspoken action, like the stand-up comic who feigns modesty by begging the audience to stop their applause while discreetly gesturing to keep it up.

Now for the bad news. Depending on how important posterity is to your work, you may want to be especially circumspect in your choice of linking destinations. Because Suck's archives are the equivalent of stone tablets in Internet years, most of their best links are dead.

And that, appropriately enough, really does suck.