This means that we must fundamentally re-think our position as subjects of electronic textuality. But this is where, I think, Moulthrop's account of hypertext is, while provocative and suggestive, also in some ways, problematic, or misconceived. And, I would add, in both these ways, representative. But the car crash, I would suggest, despite David Cronenberg, isn't very sexy, and it certainly isn't a tenable way of life. The very structure of hypertext tends to leach out the text and leave pure hyperspace.
Readers are surfers.
In contrast, similarly destroying now-conventional notions of textual separation may destroy certain attitudes associated with text, but it will not necessarily destroy text. It will, however, reconfigure it and our expectations of it. Without formal or generic constraints, our ability to make specific sense of literature diminishes even as our freedom, as readers, swells. Hypertext can model this well, both facilitating orderly learning about something, as well as the unexpected cross-linking that leads to surprise or discovery. This, of course, is also the kind of reading that we do of literary texts for research and scholarship, where, in part, the process involves computing relationships, building structures, making comparisons, etc.