Document Forms of the Internet – The Summary

The Summary as a format has been around a lot longer than the internet of course, but two things make it more prevalent on the internet.

First, hyperlinking makes it a lot easier to connect to the document being summarized, and to make the summary a lot less verbose, because the link makes what is being summarized immediately available.

Second, the Internet’s preference for shorter texts rewards summary documents.

Internet Specific Summary Form

These two features help to create a special form of the Summary (I say create in this case because while this form may have existed in the past it was not prevalent), this is the summary where a writer summarizes themselves, but not just a summary of what they have written in the past, but a summary of a number of interlocking arguments that are too long to fit in one document without suffering a loss of views, better in this case to provide a link to separate parts of ones argument, and just take the conclusions of those arguments as being a given.

The writer provides their own TLDR as a document linking to the longer argument.

It should be noted that if there was in fact the support for transclusion in the internet that there is for linking, these kinds of summaries would probably be transclusions, and could be opened in the place where their deepening of the argument applies, but as there is not as developed a support this is not the case and we are stuck with linking.

You have probably seen some examples of this on the internet, but if none spring to mind here is an example from Illuminati Ganga that employ this technique.

Mark Twain And The Racist Spectrum

This document provides an overview and summary of Mark Twain’s major works dealing with Racism. These are, according to the document: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Life on The Mississippi. The document gives a summarizing opinion on each document and provides a link to the document (excepting, at the time of this writing, Life on the Mississippi which is promised for some future amendment to the document)

Interestingly enough the Huckelberry Finn article is also a summary document

which provides summaries of various documents arguing for aspects of what makes The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn such a powerful anti-racist document, those being in turn

With the summarizing document doing the work of stitching these arguments together.

This demonstrates a drawback of the summary form, if a reader does not follow the links to the other documents that are summarized it can some times seem that the summary is unearned or lightly argued, and some of the most potent arguments for the main subject can be missed because they have been summarized away, in this case The Free Slave is probably the best of the linked arguments, but it gets reduced to a couple of sentences at best.