So I was reading the billionth article on Glenn Beck’s dumbass claim that Obama hates white people and “white culture,” and I began to wonder what the fuck he actually meant by “white culture” anyway.  It can, after all, mean two very different things.  While trying to come up with a joke to that effect, I thought about how that joke would look as a line in a blog post.  Probably something like this:

Hopefully, Beck was talking about this and not this.

And here’s my real point: you probably didn’t click those links. You just moused over them, glanced at the bottom of the screen to see where they went, and immediately understood the joke after you saw the Wikipedia URL’s.

In other words, Wikipedia links have become a type of comedic shorthand.  Everyone knows how to read a Wikipedia URL, so they just mouse over the link, spot the reference, and get on with reading the rest of the post.  Indeed, if they did click both links, that would actually be bad for the original post — aside from screwing up the pacing, the reader would end up confused when they clicked over to the next tab and found an entry on Barry Manilow. “Why the hell am I looking at this?” the reader would ask. “What link was that? Ah well, guess I missed out on that joke.”

Weirder still, when I wrote that line, I wasn’t thinking about any of this. I didn’t say to myself, “Well, they’ll check where the links go, and then move on.” I put the links in because, shit, that’s just how I’ve always done it. Many, many other people on the internet do the same thing. And chances are, most of them are doing it without being fully aware of how their audience will read those links.

So congratulations, internet. We did something that could never work in print. We are officially a unique art form. Take that, successful novelists!