The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, eds. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 319 pp.
It was in 2006 when a New York Times Magazine piece suggested that the hyperlink may be one of the most important inventions of the past fifty years. Yes, that humble little link that helps people move around the Internet at lightning speed was just as important as the Internet itself. Maybe even more important. After all, what good would the Internet be if people could not move around it? If people had to put in computer codes every time they wanted to go somewhere, the whole thing would slow to a crawl. In fact, links are such an important part of the Internet that most people would scarcely recognize that a link is something different from the Internet.