Individual textual units can exist in their unity and yet are at the same time connected to other textual units in hypertextual collage which can be entered from any point.
Commenting on the multiple reading paths possible in an hypertext environment, George Landow notes that hypertextual format brings to surface the dependence of the main text on other texts, thereby reconfiguring the text, the reader, and the author. The decentering of the text dissipates the textual as well as authorial uniqueness. The greater autonomy of the reader comes with greater responsibility to create a coherent narrative or meaning out of the dispersed and decentered text. The reader can trace her own path through the interlinked texts so that her reading constitutes a type of writing. The emergent nature of the actualization of hypertextual space, which is situated in the present act and transformed by successive transformations in context, has led theorists to see the similarities hypertext has to oral literature. Walter Ong argues that electronic technology has introduced the age of "secondary orality", which is very similar to preliterate oral cultures in "its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even of its use of formulas". Since both reading as well as writing in the hypertextual environment involves active encounter and traversal, the reader becomes an integral part of the topological space created by the interaction she has with the multiple texts.
In fact, hypertext reading/writing can be regarded as a sort of body writing --the path the reader traces marks the materialization of her nomadic subjectivity (from Jaishree K. Odin).
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