Decline of the hyperlink
2015-07-16 - Culture & Society / Media Coverage / Theory
Nice read by Hossein Derakhshan on the changing nature of the web as a democratic tool for communication: The Web We Have to Save
His points in brief: The web has changed dramatically since the massive uptake of social media in 2008. New mechanisms to build and maintain visibility, credibility and reputation have emerged. Hyperlinks, the basic mechanism to publish and access information, have been superceded by info-streams, filter algorithms and walled service-systems. New practices and metrics have been created to quantify, differentiate and select and judge information sources. This fundamentally changes the constitution of the web as an egalitarian platform for the exchange of information and knowledge, especially in the context of political communication, as more and more information is kept behind walled gardens.
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