The New Reading and Writing       Based on everyone’s responses to the article so far, it seems that most of us agree on the value of integrating hypermedia into our system of education while still maintaining a balance between the left and right brain and between the virtual and the concrete. I believe that these goals and concerns have a lot of grounding in our need for, and value of, connections, whether they are with people or texts. And that is what I find to be the most powerful about the use of hypermedia: its ability to both encourage and obstruct connections.   Personally, I’ve always wanted to pursue the ideal of the Renaissance Man -- versatile, skilled in all areas, and ever-curious -- and so the argument for using hypermedia to engaged the right brain as well as the left brain in the learning process appealed to me. Nevertheless, as someone who’s never been a big fan of TV and knows all too well how easy it is to get sucked into the Internet for mindless hours, I was a little wary of the suggestion to integrate multimedia so fully into our education. However, I found the argument for the use of hypermedia very convincing when I considered some of the classes I’d taken in high school. Many of my teachers used technology to integrate art, music, history, and video into our classes, which added greatly to my understanding and feeling of connection with the texts we were reading. That feeling of connection with a text was one of the most valuable and rewarding experiences in high school for me. Whether we viewed paintings from the 14th century while reading The Canterbury Tales, watched animations to illustrate photosynthesis, or listened to Allen Ginsberg read "Howl," the use of media made it much easier to connect to the text and the subsequent connection much stronger. However, like many of the previous posters, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of hypertext replacing printed text. I savor books -- there’s something about the physical experience of holding a book, turning the pages, and feeling the texture of the paper that simply cannot be replicated by the bright screen of a webpage. When I read and brainstorm, I like to have a physical copy of the text to hold, underline, and to scrawl notes on. In a sense, I enjoy interacting with it. Though hypermedia offers many opportunities for interaction, they are often not as personal as the experience of physically reading.   Additionally, though McCorduck lauds "computer-mediated communication[’s] "revolutionary potential" (Bump 19), I feel that, like education of the left brain only, it may have lead to "the loss of feeling in postmodern culture" (Bump 17). I don’t know how often I’ve gotten lost in a maze of web pages, only to emerge an hour later bleary-eyed, or had online conversations with friends that consist of both parties trying half-heartedly to come up with something to say. The connections I forge with people are not nearly as strong when I do so using technology as when we meet face to face. Just as there is something intrinsically different about reading a book than a webpage, there is something that I experience when interacting in person that is simply lacking when I speak to them online or even over the phone. Though multimedia is unarguably a valuable learning tool and source of information, I feel that it can reduce our relationships and interactions to less than what they could be.   Here, essentially, is my understanding of all this: though hypermedia is useful in its ability to add a feeling of connection to a piece of work, it should not dismiss the reader’s own personal interaction with the text and cannot replace his or her own feeling of connection with it.