ADHD Inattentive (ADHD-PI), Distracted by Hyperlinks

I should have mentioned in the last post that Nicholar Carr, the author of The Atlantic article titled, Is Google Making us Stupid has also written a book called The Shallows. When I was reading through some other things that Nick Carr had written I came across this fantastic article on how links in blog posts and on web pages serve to distract us even more than we are already distracted.  Those of us with Inattentive ADHD do not need any help getting distracted and internet links can be the bane or our existence.

We have all had that experience where we click a link that leads us to another link that leads us to yet another and before we know it we cannot remember what we were searching for in the first place. Those of us with Inattentive ADHD (ADHD-PI) are especially prone to be distracted by links and in general I have tried to avoid putting links in my posts. Recently I have learned a fact about links that has significantly added to limited internet knowledge and I have begun to use them more.

Google and the other search engines use your links (among other things) to figure out what the heck you are writing about. If you link to other posts that you have written about a certain topic, the search engine robots 'learn' more about what your current and your previous post is about.  I am pretty inattentive to the details of internet related blog stuff and have only recently started to learn about things like keywords and links. If I did not suffer from Inattentive ADHD I might have adopted the use of  keywords or links earlier so as to give better visibility to my blog post.  As it turns out, not having all those pesky links in my posts might have been a  really good thing for my readers.

Nick Carr has proposed in a post (whose link I will include at the bottom of this post for reasons that are probably now obvious) that we include all links to other articles or blog posts at the end of the post so as not to distract the reader while they are reading and run the risk that the reader will click away from the page, never to return again and never to remember what they were trying to discover when they first set out to search. If this is important for people without Inattentive ADHD you can only imagine how really important it is for those of us with ADHD-PI.

I will in the future, given the distraction level of myself and my readers, include all links to blog posts and articles at the end of the post instead of within them. Tell me what you think about this idea, OK?

The Shallows
Is Google Making us Stupid 
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification: