I've always thought the best metaphor for hypertext isn't the Web but the Labyrinth, in the sense that Benjamin uses it to describe the reorientation of modern city space. The minotaur at this labyrinth's centerless center is of course "the user," even if s/he also plays the part of Theseus. Clicking through and clicking back pay out a thread of connection that becomes more important than the sites it leads you to: hypertext as an experience of time as much as "place." In this way net-surfing is very much a sentimental education à la Flaubert (cf. Loss Glazier's description of links as a node of "sentimentalized" choice). In David Harvey's reading of L'Education Sentimentale, for example, Frederic Moreau becomes a prototype of the contemporary websurfer: "What is special is the way [Moreau] glides in and out of the differentiated spaces of the city, with the same sort of ease that money and commodities change hands. ... Action is reduced to a set of paths that might have been but were not taken. 'The thought of the future torments us, and the past is holding us back,' Flaubert later wrote, adding, 'that is why the present is slipping from our grasp.'" The challenge for web users, designers, editors is to meet this slippage, now rapidly constituting itself as "the nature of the medium."