Reading
Salon often seems to be an exercise in hyperlinking... everything links to everything else and to understand the one, you need to understand the others. It's like the ultimate World Wide Web exercise.
Perhaps I like Salon (and the nature of the Web and HTML) so much because I believe that all information is linked. Granted, that's not exactly earth-shaking or even a new observation, but it's my own observation nevertheless. It was a personal revelation I experienced in university, not something I read somewhere. So there.
At any rate, it's exciting to realize that to understand and appreciate a piece of writing as fully as possible, you need to understand so many other things around it - the political situation, its geographic location, historical events, the author's background - biographical
and demographical... everything. Of course, you can also appreciate a piece on its own merits, independent of influencing factors, but all the other elements make for an interesting perspective. I
know I'm not the only one who thinks that way... after all, how else would you account for the popularity of
The Making Of -type shows? Of course part of the appeal of these shows is the voyeuristic looking-through-someone's-head pleasure of tracing someone's thought and creative process, and the mingling of "I could do that" and "How the hell does he do that?"
