But it is especially a necessity in education, for both student and teacher. Necessities can be burdens, or they can be opportunities. They are the Pinta, the Ni a, the Santa Maria, and Apollo 11 and 13 all combined. The sea monsters threaten. The White Whale may eat your hard drive.
Disaster is inevitable.
But these media can transport us to New Worlds. Or more precisely, they can provide the means to rediscover our World and to recover from it new insights into our human experience. Because of these new media we have a breadth of access to one another as human beings and access to the artifacts of our cultural heritage that was unimagined 25 years ago. Connections with a dead poet, connections with my own muddled feelings and half-thunk thoughts, even connections with my students. Since the new media amplify our opportunities to connect, my development of a website on literary criticism was perhaps inevitable.