The Link-Clicking Calculus.

In the early days of using the web, the link was blue. You clicked on it. And waited. For the page to download. Over the phone line.

In late grade-school, we had a computer lab to teach touch typing. It also had the internet, but the internet was not the web just yet. It was a gopher client. You could browse whatever documents it served. All I really remember is that it was named Spinal Tap at a time I wasn’t familiar with the film (This is Spinal Tap). A web search turns up a World Wide Web Consortium test file that references the server: gopher://spinaltap.micro.umn.edu. As I was in 4th grade, my interests were mostly humor, so I remember mostly looking at the server’s humor documents, probably Monty Python’s Flying Circus scripts or some such.

Point is, you had limited time even then. You had to learn to discern! Especially when using a home phone on the actual web at 3200 baud (“List of interface bit rates,” Narrowband (POTS: 4 kHz channel)). It took time to load a page, time you did not want to waste on a dud, so your brain picked up context clues to try to make skillful clicks. Purple links reminded you what you’d already viewed, to save you more time, especially because of limited caches.

Back then, browsers (Netscape Navigator in my case) had an always-shown status bar where hovering a link displayed the URL. It wasn’t until years later that the status bar fell away, but hovering a link still shows the URL at the bottom of browsers to this day. That was key information. You got a feel for whether a site was worth it, or at least learned to avoid ones you knew would be a waste.

Most people did not grow up with the web. And mobile browsers do not make it easy to practice the same sort of evaluations. The software and hardware vendors, the web and tech ecosystems, have all shifted away from those systems that once trained users automatically to learn the cues to find better information, and so today we have multiple generations of users who don’t know crud when they see it. That’s without getting into phishing and outright malice, just site-quality, avoiding wastes of time like endless-scrolling treadmills feeding you a random-reinforcement schedule of inane videos.

It’s part of a general problem: the need to teach citizens how to be discerning in general. To have strong bullshit detectors is essential to democracy. The same people who would vote for regressive candidates are the ones who don’t know how to find good information about other subjects. They don’t know how important vaccines are to public health. And their social feeds simply dump more lies at their door, they don’t even have the choice of what to click when scrolling itself brings more of the same.

I still check the URL when I click a link. I still want visited-links colored so I know if I have visited a page before. The old web had the user’s back. The new tools are not doing us the same favors. The web and tech need a new kind of training wheels.