This is the first of several points worth noting here. Your comment describing when you connected the dots makes me think a little of the photomosaics floating around the web, each of which depicts an image made up of smaller images, almost always of the same subject. I imagine beginning by looking at a single picture, and then pulling back to see the larger mosaic. It’s not much of an extension to imaging pulling back again, to see that that mosaic was just a “pixel” in another image (or that the original “starting” image was made up of such pixels itself). It’s a recursive thought experiment, but I’m constantly finding real-life parallels to it.

This all gets at the importance of context, the inclusion of which isn’t necessarily an inherent strength of the web. Admittedly, one of my pleasures is to stumble across a random and relatively “deep” section of someone’s site, but I usually do what you describe, Michael, and back out to the “root” to see who’s presenting information.

I don’t know that that practice is common, especially among younger, native web users. And that worries me just a bit, but I can’t exactly say why.

Finally, I’ll add some contact info to my page