We pay a lot of attention to flashy technologies-multimedia presentations, real-time
videoconferencing and document markup, vast hypermedic webs of global information-but
our cleverest machines are invisible, used without thought, adapted and made
part of our lives.
As Donna Haraway (1985) analyzes the situation, technology becomes intangible-"made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals . . . ether, quintessence" (p. 70). So while extraordinary experiences, like reading hypertext fiction, retain the capability to surprise us, the most prevalent forms of hypertext escape our critical attention, a sort of textual elitism. It's almost as if we enact literature's condescension toward composition by ignoring instructional texts in favor of more "interesting" texts.
Even in when documents were only printed texts, if they were discussed at
all it was only in terms of derision. There's truth to the saying "If all
else fails, read the manual." But online documentation overcomes some of
this resistance by putting the manual within the technology. This act paradoxically
makes manuals easier to access and more forgettable once we do use them. Their
very success lies in their ability to work unnoticed. With hypertext, the texts
that help us learn how to use computers become so light and clean that we can
no longer easily consider (let alone criticize) their operations. 
Where
reading functional instructions in print requires retrieving books from shelves,
locating and consulting indexes, physically turning pages to locate information,
functional hypertexts automate and make invisible the processes of use.