How do links act to conceal and reveal and why is this important? Provide an example that show links behaving as Burbules describes.
The way in which links act to conceal and/or reveal information, unless thought about in some debth, can be and usually is very subtle to most people. The reasoning behind this is, because one must consider the certain biases of the web page and links author or what purpose/s he or she had in mind when creating those links to his or her main web page. However, whether or not the reader considers possible designer biases, he or she will most assuredly make connections of his/her own when jumping from one web page to another via links. How this happens, as Burbules explained with his example of the rock music/drugs reference, is that if someone were to go to a web page promoting rock music and then click on a link leading to drug abuse, that person would make an automatic assumption that rock music and drugs are interrelated. For the more analytical reader, such connections may serve to be a point of critique, however most people (I don't think) pay that close attention. At any rate, while clicking on a link that leads you from the rock music web page to the drug abuse web page may instantly reveal an interrelationship between rock music and drug abuse, that link may also be concealing the fact that not all rock musicians are drug abusers or that drug abuse happens within many circles all the way from rock bands to church choirs.
Example: http://www.weather.com/
This example features The Weather Channel's main web page. Right away, I noticed that there is a link at the top of the page called "travel". When hovering over the link, I noticed the drop down menu which consisted of several sub-links. At first I expected to be able to click on "travel" and immediately find out what the weather is like for traveling to whatever destination I so desired, but upon further investigation, I realized that most of the sub-links under the "travel" link are just prompts to get me to buy something, ie. "Destination Disney".
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