In today’s world, I feel there is a fine line between the “real” world and the digital world. While it becomes easier to blend together the two sides of our brains, our emotions and our reasoning, new technology does pose problems. I find the “digitalization of the arts” (Paragraph 9) as a threat to the world I am familiar with.

One year, our school headmaster proposed that instead of printing a yearbook, we issue a CD of what had happened throughout the school year. The Yearbook staff spoke out strongly against this idea, and hopefully our school will continue to issue a yearbook long after I’m gone. Something like a yearbook is far too important to shrink into digital dots and dashes—holding it is a visual and sense-related experience I know many would not want to lose. What would happen if our childhood storybooks were shrunk to PDF format, if art was only accessible as a JPEG? Nothing can replace the feeling of a glossy magazine in your hands, or being read from the thick paper pages of an heirloom storybook.

So how would I like to learn? While I find myself using the Internet and digital media every day, I’m still very frightened of the possibility of the digital world replacing the concrete world. Though I want to see things and hear things, to bombard my senses from every possible angle, I also want to hold on to a text I can feel is real. Involving all of the senses in this type of learning immediately makes me think of the Renaissance man—well versed in every aspect of life from the arts to the sciences, having received “education for the ‘whole’ person” (Paragraph 17). I look forward to learning how to stretch both the right and left sides of my brain.