Fiction as collage, filter or search engine "Surf-sample-manipulate (surf the culture, sample data and then change that data to meet the specific needs of the narrative)" is Mark Amerika's seamless, yet mediated system of defining the relationship between the author's narrative and the data stream around her. His Alt-X site is dedicated to promoting the conjunction of the "digerati and the literati."

Quote-links as links to external material tend to diminish the power and even the readability of hyperfiction, making it diffuse and far less vivid, reducing the fictions to search engines of a sort, interrupting the focus of attention the reader needs to grasp a fictional universe whole. Of course that, as well as anything else, can be the SUBJECT of a fiction, in the way that linear texts often haul in all sorts of textual debris from the "outside" world, and even become wholly collages of such material. The problem, at least on the Net, is going home again (example: a talented young writer at Brown mentioned, in passing, a prep school and provided the reader with a link to that school's homepage; so far, the school has not returned the favor, so the story "ends" there), but if home is interesting enough, the reader will learn the route back from whatever distraction.