Understanding Knowledge Work

Alan Liu responds to reviews of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information by N. Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker, both of whom admire Liu's book but believe that it exaggerates the influence of corporate knowledge work while providing an inadequate response to its destructive ahistoricism. Liu proposes that the digital age needs "new-media platforms of humanistic instruction" to supplement critical and theoretical humanistic approaches to help students understand how the human concerns and impulses that give rise to new media productions relate to knoweldge work.

Pull Quotes

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.

Creative Works referenced

Patchwork Girl

Critical Writing referenced

The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information

Humanities Games and the Market in Digital Futures

Attacking the Borg of Corporate Knowledge Work: The Achievement of Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool