Anthony Grafton Defends the Footnote (1997)

Years ago, I read Infinite Jest, which famously has hundreds of footnotes, so many that the entire last fourth of the book is composed of them. At that time, it seemed innovative and academic in a really intellectual, mind-expanding way, a bit like how inline Wikipedia links probably felt in 2003.

I recently started re-reading the book and had the exact opposite reaction. It seemed excessive, bloated, and generally just overdone. I'm left wishing that DFW had incorporated the footnotes into the writing itself and was just more succinct in general.

It led me to think that this is probably a subconscious reaction to the "excess of information" age we find ourselves in. This link and Infinite Jest were both written in a pre-Internet age.

Regarding the use of footnotes in non-fixed media, such as webpages and ePub (ebooks), I feel that the distinction between footnotes and endnotes is somewhat irrelevant because they are hidden at the end of the relevant article/chapter. However, with ebooks the notion of endnotes makes more sense to me, as the notes would be pushed to the back of the book instead of the back of the relevant chapter.