The Case for Endnotes

Critical Ignoring is the new Critical Thinking

A new push is being made for redefining how we decide to give attention to various pieces of media, a trend dubbed “critical ignoring”¹. The trend argues that we were taught in school to read a piece, think critically about it, and assess the validity of its information and arguments after investing some time to consider it. This is a problem in the modern age, however; the velocity of information generation, from random blog posts on the internet to big budget shows and movies disseminated by your favorite streaming platform, is too great. The concept of critical ignoring centers suggests that instead of investing in a piece to determine if it is worth considering we should pop open a new tab and use the past experiences of others to see if the media was made in bad faith, or if it was just poorly constructed.

Many people do this with movies and TV shows. There are tons of sites² dedicated to reviewing and rating these things so the average time-poor individual can make a judgment about whether it is is worth it before investing several hours. Apparently few do it with supposed news stories or information posted on social media, though.³

It is easy blame the victims here. After all, how would we actually wrangle the disingenuous media when so much of everything is being produced and there are free speech considerations to moderation from tech platforms. A ton of friction also exists when “doing your own research” into the validity of a source. We can’t reasonably expect the average person to open a new browser tab and click through three or four links when the share button is right there, shiny and purposely designed to trick our brains into giving the site additional engagement. Additionally, some information can only be passed in an inherently unreliable way. How would we know about the Bin Laden raid⁴ if not for “internet randos?”

I do not have an answer here, but I do think that critical ignoring is, ironically, ignoring a pretty big part of why we are where we are, and I think it has something to do with hyperlinks.

Inline Links: the Ultimate Distraction

When HTML was conceived, it was proposed as a way to help scientists and academics share information quickly and easily without losing it in a complex and evolving system of documentation.⁵ The thought was that people would be reviewing a specific, though large, set of documents that were related to projects within a single organization. This original use case did not consider heavily linking outside sources, or even the use of it by people who were not directly working on scientific projects. Hyperlinks were a reaction to a system that was organized heirarchically, which caused issues when trying to access information about, say, compiler commands for Unix systems.

Some sites still have this idea at heart. TV Tropes is one. Wikipedia is another.⁶ What is one thing that both of those have problems with? The average reader cannot finish an article without being hit with many redirects to interesting or related material. This related material is similarly filled with links to even more material with links. Without even leaving the main site, both can effectively burn hours of one’s time, though they may have gone there to confirm a small piece of information. Can they even remember that piece when they are finished playing Clicks to Hitler?⁷

To bluntly state it, inline hyperlinks are the web’s biggest distraction. Readers can become ad-blind⁸, silence notifications, or block social media but they cannot get away from links baked into the very content they are searching for, prodding to give context with a quick click.

More importantly, hyperlinks provide ways for bad media to propagate. This is not only in the easy sharing of links to bad sites in 240 character snippets, but also the use of these links to distract readers from the naive defenses they have against bad information: critical reading and thinking. Sites like Fox News⁹ use inline hyperlinks to pretend that they have solid backing for the things they say. A lot of these links are actually just links back to their own site, so validation without any of those pesky independent sources. (Note: left-leaning sites to this too. It’s about engagement to serve ads rather than trying to destabilize the country/world, but that’s not really a defense, is it.) Other sites that are trying to effect greater change with purposeful misinformation post links to pseudoscience or other outright lies. They, too, are looking trick readers into not engaging in a critical reading of the presented information.

Can We Keep the Good but drop the Bad?

I would like to propose we revert to a bygone era of writing: high school essays. In these juvenile attempts to prove we were understood the assigned material enough to get a grade that would land us in a decent college, we had requirements such as using a certain number of primary sources and presenting them with breadcrumbs in the form of endnotes or footnotes.

Both endnotes and footnotes provide hyperlinks to sources that are connected to the text in a similar way to inline links. Unlike inline links, endnotes and footnotes do not (or I should say should not) drop you off at a new site without any context as to why the author specifically directed you there. When you engage with a link to an endnote, it takes you to the bottom of the page. In most cases, it will also provide a link to quickly return to the area where the endnote was mentioned. Here is an example if you haven’t tried any of the above.¹⁰

Endnotes also allow the author to expand upon something that may not be totally appropriate for the text of the article. If, for example, you wanted to know more about that Bin Laden thing⁴, you could read the text I copied below. It’s a distraction, though, so I would save it until the end.

With endnotes, you can get context without even leaving the article, preserving your context, time, and focus.

Endnotes vs. Footnotes vs. Sidenotes

Why is this post about endnotes, and not footnotes or the famous Tufte sidenotes?¹¹ Well, I think any of these options are better than inline links. Even a Gwern-style popup¹² is better.

I think the most important point in support of endnotes, however, is how out of the way they are. I dislike Tufte-style sidenotes because they pull at you to look at them as soon as you discover their link in the text. They also can take up a lot of space and are clunky on mobile or smaller devices. And while footnotes amount to much the same thing as endnotes on the web, they still split information, and potentially even sentences, in print to interject with something the author knows is not of critical importance. If it was, you should just be reading that instead of what the author wrote. This does not even mention the absurd complexity required to draw them for print, which may not affect you as a reader or writer, but will if you are a printer or software engineer tasked with making them happen while knowing that endnotes exist.

Take Away

Please consider using at lease one of the note systems in your own writing. Ideally, reliable sources would start to use them exclusively as well. Maybe then we wouldn’t need to develop a high friction coping mechanism just to survive the information age.

Notes