In the winter in early 2020, I taught a project “go as deep or stay as shallow”, which is a quote from Joshua Quittner’s Way New Journalism manifesto, an optimistic text published on Hotwired in 1995, where Quittner called to the journalist of 25 years ago not to be afraid of making links to immerse themselves in the world of hypertext and hyper images OUT there, outside of your text or publishing platform. The group I was teaching was very young. I knew I would be the first to tell them about the difference between the Internet and the WWW, the history of hypertext and hyperlink, the values of EtoE and the treasures of p2p, and of the urgency of breaking out of walled gardens, the importance of not obeying the one link Instagram allows you. I was prepared to start from the basics. What I was not prepared for was that students would ask me what I mean by the only one link that Instagram allows its users? Where is it?
They didn’t know about the link, they didn’t see it, and were not missing anything. I was trying to fire up a resistance against the cruel policy of Instagram, but achieved the opposite. It made Instagram even more generous in their eyes. Then I told this to an older student of mine. By “older” in this case, I mean she had already had a conversation with me about blue underlined words some semesters ago and had produced several great projects. She said that, with all due respect to all the links I made, Instagram’s policy of not allowing links is great, it helps her to stay concentrated and to see only what she wants to see.
This is not a story about young people, it is the destiny of computer users of all generations. Adapting, forgetting, delegating.
https://interfacecritique.net/book/olia-lialina-from-my-to-me/