Links.
Fifty or so years ago Thomas Kuhn penned Theory of Scientific Revolutions
And we learned that we tend to think in-box.
The Link (cross discipline thinking) is the antidote.
Links.
The fabric of our world wide Web.
They have an ancient history…
And this Benfii.com series “The Link” is endeavoring to explore as much of that history as it can.
It is a history of man’s search for connections; relation. How does this bit relate to that bit. It is as old as man, or older. And it is our way of making sense of the world.
Other’s have written similar work (the book The Information comes to mind) and I suppose it will go to others to shed any future light on the subject too. I am just scribbling.
Writing about the link is most likely a goal that could never be finished, but worthwhile to think about and try because there is one link that is very important for us to make. A link about our life. Are you making the connections? I will leave that up to you to find.
But here in this brief post may I outline some quick notes on the outstanding history of links. In no particular order:
- the bible. was not always segmented by chapters and verses. the story of its segmenting by Robert Estienne (and indexing – cross references) is a story of man’s push into information management.
- the dewey decimal system and library indexing
- postal code systems
- tagging and categorization in blogging
- the hyperlink and Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web
- the QR code (a “physical hyperlink”)
- IoT (links between things and the internet)
To see what other links there are read our series “The Link”