Transclusions and its Role in Hypertext Documents

People, especially older adults are vulnerable to misinformation online, even under normal circumstances. But the coronavirus has made the problem of call to action. They are more susceptible to the virus, making discerning reliable health information necessary now.

"Misinformation is always heightened when there's more significant confusion. There can be a devastating impact if one gets the wrong information, specifically around Covid," stated Jean Setzfand, Senior Vice President of programs at AARP, the advocacy group for older adults.

However, online webinars, classes, and videos to teach older people about misinformation are popping up, from "MediaWise for Seniors," a program designed by AARP and the media nonprofit Poynter Institute, to "How to Spot Fake News," a free class from Senior Planet, a part of the nonprofit Older Adults Technology Services.

Given the truth's obvious vulnerabilities, humankind should be doing more to protect it before sending it to do battle. But having constructed a technological tool that disseminates information instantaneously and globally without regard to its integrity, it's no surprise that this tool has left people drowning in lies.

Ted's Transclusion

There's a saying, "First weafter that tools, thereafter our tools shape us." The copy-and-paste notions of truth and factuality likely have their roots in the early Web intended initially only to link resources stored across a heterogeneous range of computers at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. The particle physicists' tool soon helped everybody to share information about everything. But the Web's hyperlinks inevitably create an impenetrable thicket of pointers, from one resource to another, until it turned into a global, hyperlinked document space, paradoxically making the truth more obscure than ever.

Two decades before the Web, hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson offered another model. More subtle than a simple copy-and-paste operation, Nelson's approach allows one document to embed the content of another via a link to a portion of the source document. In such a system, nothing requires to be copied. The referring form 'transcludes' an amount of the material found in the source document.

Transclusion allows for creating hypertext documents that are themselves the assembly of other hypertext documents. While any document can contain original content, it simultaneously serves as a window onto other documents, enabling viewers to reach into and through references, all the way back to their primary sources. Transclusion could have created a Web built on a set of unimpeachable, globally accepted sources of information.

Presented by content management systems that algorithmically compose documents from numerous sources, the modern Web gradually converged with Nelson's vision for transclusion with one key difference. The Web offers no single source of truth, nor any ultimate reference to a set of trusted sources. Instead, everything points to everything else that tends to make the Web appear broader and more authoritative than it is. That explains why conspiracy theories like QAnon are so difficult to root out.

It would only take a few subtle changes to nudge the Web away from the shifting sands of links and plant it firmly in the real world of universally accepted facts. The nature of these authoritative sources will be fought over, naturally, as fierce rivals battle it out to set the terms for defining the truth. Yet humanity would possess "a truth universally acknowledged" to build consensus, borrowed from Jane Austen.