Interface Culture Free Write

I think when Steven Johnson says that the hypertext link is the first truly new form of punctuation in centuries, he is saying that nothing has so completely altered our culture and the way we view text as the development of the web and the new language that has come along with it. Johnson is right; if somebody from the 1960s were to look at the way we nonchalantly place links within news stories, in books and give mention to Web sites, they would have no idea what we were talking about.

This way of punctuating links () in texts and the very makeup of the link itself (http://www.) is something completely funny to think about interepreting if you don't already know what it means. Since I have grown up seeing this kind of writing and knowing about web lingo it doesn't strike me as weird, but in thinking about another type of writing or punctuation technique that has come along and altered the text we read, it is impossible.

While certain fields of study bring along with them their own jargon and are often creating new terms that are hard to understand, I can't think of a field that has brought with it a new way of punctuating, not just the words themselves.