Article in a print journal

The digital sense of history may not be history as it really was, but it is information as it should really be: an experience of mediated communication that—as a condition of what it means to be social—is historical to the core.

My argument is that the amplest experience of sociality includes the society that is history, and social media will be more fully human if it remembers that.

Cultural-political theorists of digital-age “empire” (in the tradition of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), academic critics of new media, and hactivist or tactical-media theorists (in the tradition of the Critical Art Ensemble) point out in various ways that Web 2.0 is still complicit with the confining structures of history.

Digital tools for humanities scholarship are crucial. Humanities approaches to digital tools are even more crucial.

Simply put, the humanities preserve our cultural legacy—not as a collection of static artifacts, but as stimuli to acts of interpretation. In our generation, that entire legacy will migrate into digital form. I can't stress this enough. Our access to the history of human thought will come through the mediation of electronic instruments.

We have to engage with new media as a way to extend humanities ideas: subjectivity (perspective rooted in a point of view that is always inside of experience); historicity (the social production across time and cultural institutions of any artifact); and instability (the performative aspect of interpretation as an act through which a work is constituted).

The new basics for functioning with literacy and fluency in the mediated world are writing, copying, researching, assessing sources, creating arguments, thinking, drawing, filmmaking, video editing, and above all, critical practices in editing, analysis, combinatorics (montage and pastiche), and the creation of self-conscious reflection on process.

Shifting beyond a mechanistic, Newtonian attitude toward objects of humanities inquiry into a quantum approach where a probabilistic field is intervened in each act of interpretation, we are trying to create digital tools that push conceptual limits.

Aesthesis is the term I use to suggest that the arts have a role to play in creating an alternative to the instrumental rationality that gives computational methods their cultural authority.

[T]he humanities cannot afford to abandon its connection with history, or to construe this connection solely as the history of critical destruction. Such a narrowing of historical focus and thus of the meaning and importance of the humanities would be a grievous capitulation to the very forces that Liu so admirably deconstructs and wishes to combat.

Following the lead of Dario Gamboni in The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Liu looks for examples of "de-arting" that will have the "heft" to deconstruct the prevailing assumptions of knowledge work. This leads to what is in my view the most tenuous part of his complex chain of inferences, for "de-arting," in its emphasis on destructive creativity (the opposite of the creative destruction heralded by the relentless and constant innovation that underwrites the ideology of knowledge work), can easily slide into vandalism and even terrorism.

Though it may be true that few places on earth remain entirely unaffected by global information networks, surely it is an exaggeration to claim, as Liu says, ventriloquizing the voice of diversity management, that "pure business culture remains definitive of all culture.

Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information is a big book—big in scope, ambition, research, vision, analysis, and the challenge it presents to the academy. Its publication represents a landmark event in understanding where we are headed as we plunge ever deeper into the infosphere of ubiquitous computing, global Internet culture, and information economies.

My Laws of Cool is critical, theoretical, and historical, as is much of Drucker's and Hayles's best known work. Such work cannot by itself answer the huh? It can only do so when complemented by something like a new-media textbook/anthology for our times—a kind of "Understanding Knowledge Work."

It remains to be seen whether such attempts toward "understanding knowledge work" can change the great, cool huh? of our times to you changed my life.