The essay "The Revenge of the Page" studies the way web argumentative hypertexts do not use complex link chains, and whether or not we should give up the ideal of hypertexts that make rhetorical gestures that are accomplished over complex link patterns. The author don't think so (surprise!) and he makes some suggestions about ways of overcoming the bias towards single-link rhetorical moves that he sees built into the structure of node-and-link hypertext.
(Required note: This paper is (c) ACM 2008. This is the author's version of the work, posted here by permission of the ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive versions are published in the proceedings of the Hypertext08 conference.)
For a discussion of modes of criticism that do not claim to speak from a secure meta-platform, see the essay "Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion" in Adrift in the Technological Matrix, Bucknell Review 46.2, Autumn 2002, 90-108.