The Hyperlink is (or should be) the New Footnote

It is quite remarkable, when one thinks of it, how much even 20 years after the emergence of the internet in universities and that wonderful invention, the hyperlink, how little academic products, whether what we produce as scholars or ask our students to submit, actually link to anything. The link is still the parent pauvre of academia, a second best solution to proper footnoting. So time and time again, we will find an article mentioned in an online text or article and have to search it independently on the web or elsewhere. For most of us, the footnote will be a deadend, a bridge to nowhere.
This is not just a minor waste of time, it also prevents us from making more connections between different pieces of scholarship, and limits our abilit to navigate knowledge. These connections themselves and the paths they create seem to be an interesting byproduct of contemporary scholarship - indeed something that one might want to study to delineate fields, etc. They facilitate forms of intellectual peregrination and dialogue between academic artifacts that are probably well worth the effort. We still pretend to footnote, though, as if knowing the volume and page number of a piece was more important than having the stable link to its opening page.
This is bound to change sooner or later. First, the increasing amount of academic material on the internet, including material that is only produced for and available online, will make it increasingly artificial to refer to paper versions that no longer really exist or are just gathering dust somewhere. Second, more and more of the work we do will be posted directly online. Sometimes, it will just be in the form of uploaded pdfs that still subscribe to the canons of footnoting, but increasingly it will be in pure electronic forms (websites, blogs, fora) where footnoting will be inconvenient and irrelevant. It is high time we started hyperlinking more systematically.