Hypertext 2.3

To me, hypertext simplifies the process of extracting information from the Internet immensely. I rarely read the entirety of one page without finding something else which is more relevant to the information I’m looking up before I reach the end. Something I find with the Internet is that I’ll be looking for a specific topic, and simply typing vague key words into google doesn’t usually generate exactly what I’m looking for, by going to a web-site which is in the same general area, this allows me to become more and more specific, until I get exactly what I need. I’m sure, given the wealth of information out there, that if I were hoping to type something into google and for exactly what I want to be on the first page of results will rarely ever happen. Through hypertext I can find what I want much more simply as well as allowing me to then find something else relevant, and possibly even more relevant to the purpose than what I was originally looking for.

However, the large amount of hypertext on the Internet can also have a downside. For example, even after you’ve found what you were originally looking for, often more information and questions will still be swimming around in your mind, often doubling the length of time you intended to spend searching. Also, often through following endless hyperlinks you can end up reading about a topic you did not intend to learn about, for example, in looking up some information about what films are coming up recently, I ended up spending far too much time reading about film trivia as well as ruining the endings to films I haven’t seen yet by reading synopsises on the Internet Movie Database!