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Wow! We’re off to a great start towards a book on the new liberal arts. How do I know? My scrollbar gets teeeeny-tiny when I click that link.

We’re talking about potential NLAs like archiving, attention economics, branding, collaboration, home economics, mapping, micropolitics, photography, play, urbanism, writing for computers — the list goes on and on. And I’m realizing that we’re going to have to get good at a bunch of these new skills, fast, just to make this thing.

So what comes next? Starting this weekend, we’ll reach out to some contributors from the comment thread on that original post; then, we’ll all spend the next week writing and editing. The deadline for copy will be Monday, February 16.

After that… we design the book!

Then, of course, there’s printing; we’re thinking hard about that step. If you have any tips, insights, or leads related to that part of the process, we’d love to hear them. You can leave a comment on this post or send an email: Is there a printing company you love? Some new print-on-demand scheme that we should know about? Elephant poop paper? Etc.

Look for another book update early next week. And, if you haven’t yet suggested a new liberal art of your own — now is precisely the time! Jump in.

Seriously, look at that scrollbar. It’s barely there.

Howard Weaver brings it:

People who wish some billionaire would endow newsrooms so they don’t have to change — you know who you are — have the musty smell of the mausoleum all about them. They move through twilight, walking stiffly toward a setting sun. They will find no pot of gold there.

Yet the digitalistas who suggest those newsrooms can be readily duplicated or replaced act like willful children, unmindful that substance, craft and capacity matter in the real world, that no group of 10,000 monkeys has ever written Shakespeare, that 98 of the 100 most important pieces of public service journalism last year flowed from professionals in the newsrooms they recklessly disregard.

This is a fool’s game. It’s time for grown-ups to intervene, to end the debate and move beyond the empty calories of nostalgia and the masturbatory fantasies of a theory-based future. A long-deceased, much missed colleague often referred to people with mature judgment and a steady hand by saying, “She knows where babies come from.” Those are the folks we need on the case now.

Really, what else is there to say? Howard’s style here reminds me of Ezra Pound at his caustic, humanistic best. And yes, that’s a compliment.

Dan Visel at if:book has a super entry/exhibition on postal art from Ray Johnson to Ben Greenman:

Johnson ran what he called the New York Correspondence School; he used the word correspondence not simply for its reference to communication but for the way he made associations with words and graphic elements in his collages… Membership was seemingly capricious and full of contradictions: members included institutions and the dead; the school committed suicide publicly at least once; and it was at best the most constant member of a baffling parade of clubs and organizations that Johnson ran, including, at random, Buddha University, the Deadpan Club, the Odilon Redon Fan Club, the Nancy Sinatra Fan Club…

“The whole idea of the Correspondence School,” Johnson told Richard Bernstein in an interview with Andy Warhol’s Interview in August, 1972 “is to receive and dispense with these bits of information, because they all refer to something else. It’s just a way of having a conversation or exchange, a kind of social intercourse.” Emblematic of Johnson’s work might be his Book about Death, begun in 1963, which consisted of thirteen printed pages of collaged images and text, which were mailed individually to Clive Phillpot, chief librarian at the Museum of Modern Art, and others. (A few pages are reproduced below.) The Book about Death was discorporate, as befits a book about death; more than being unbound, Johnson made sure that none of his readers received a complete set of the pages of the book. The book could only be assembled and read in toto by the correspondents working in concert: it was a book that demanded active participation in its reading. The content as well as the form of the Book about Death request active participation: the names of his correspondents feature prominently in it, but understanding of what Johnson was doing with those names requires some knowledge of the people who had those names.

One of my favorite recent literature/history/theory books is Bernhard Siegert’s Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Visel doesn’t quite say this, but it’s clear that despite Johnson’s humanist intents, he was using the technology of the mails in a way that was pretty resolutely anti-nostalgic. (In his fake-manifesto “Personism,” Frank O’Hara says that he once realized while he was writing a poem for someone that he could just as easily pick up the telephone and call them — you might say that Johnson realized he could just as easily send them a cheap postcard.)

Greenman, on the other hand, with his de luxe edition “book” collecting accordioned pamphlets and postcards, is working in a different register, where similar gestures connote a backwards-looking resistance to both electronic communication and industrial book design. But (and here Visel is spot on) both foreground the notion that literature doesn’t just have a reader but a recipient — a correspondent, so to speak — whose contact with the author begins with (but isn’t necessarily limited to) buying or reading or thinking about or talking about the book.

Virginia Heffernan at NYT would totally be way up high in my bloggers’ fantasy draft, with Scott Horton, John Gruber, Carmen van Kerckhove, Jim Fallows, Daniel Larison, Ron Silliman, Ben Vershbow (ret.), Eileen Joy… anyways, you see where this is going.

Anyways, her new magazine essay on digital reading with her three-year-old son is eminently blogworthy, not least for the universal reference:

I’d like for Ben to sit with One More Story and come away with the impression that he’d been read beautiful books all afternoon. But Ben tends to ask for One More Story when he wants privacy, the same state of mind in which he likes videos. Books, by contrast, are for when he feels snuggly.

Which brings up something significant about books for a 3-year-old: whatever else preschool reading is, it’s intimate. Before you can read, you get to see books mostly when you’re cuddled up with an adult or jostling with other kids in a circle.

Heffernan goes on to say: “I’m not sure he’s developing an appreciation for books. But he is learning how to enrich his solitude, and that is one of the most intensely pleasurable aspects of literacy.” Other intriguing thoughts include the relationship between interactive digi-books and video games, TV, and movies, the Freakonomics thesis that having books in your house is more important than reading them to your children, and a reluctant skepticism towards viewing digital reading as “reading-plus.” I don’t agree with everything VH throws out there, but it’s all worthwhile.

This is great: a librarian identifies curiously common references to “cuddling” in newspaper discussions of print and electronic books. As in, nobody is ever going to use an e-book reader because you can’t “cuddle” (up with) it.

Preferably, it appears, by a fire. Because apparently everybody’s got a fireplace that they read in front of, and without a proper fire, chair, smoking jacket, and appropriate analog print media, there’s no reason to spend hard money on a book, magazine, or newspaper.

My favorite rejoinder is the one outlier: “Forget about the warmth a real book offers when you cuddle up with it by the fire. People spend so much time on buses and planes, in boring meetings, or at kids’ soccer practices or hockey games.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about sites of reading and the different physical relationships to text they require. It’s fascinating how particular sites and ways of reading crowd out others — often to make a new activity seem MUCH more new than it really is.

Dan Cohen’s has a lucid and thoughtful post about the recent Smithsonian 2.0 meeting. In it there’s a paraphrase (from memory, he says) of David Recordon’s vision of the future of the Smithsonian:

Before I visit Washington, I want to be able to go to the web and select items I

I love Ron Rosenbaum’s takedown of Billy Joel; you really have to dislike someone to go to the lengths taken by Rosenbaum to document, distill, and identify what makes them so bad.

My favorite part, though, is Rosenbaum’s side-snipe at Jeff Jarvis:

Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis (the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times’ David Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes. Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he’s a Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he wrote: “If I can’t get Allentown, the original, I’m not likely to settle for a cover.” Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! (“Allentown” is a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis’ part, since it’s one of B.J.’s “concern” songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)

See, this is the thing: there’s a weird way in which the entire attack on Billy Joel just allegorizes Rosenbaum’s frustration with Jarvis. Read RR’s December article, “Is Jeff Jarvis Gloating Too Much About the Death of Print?” if you’re not convinced.

In the medieval university, the seven classical liberal arts were split into two categories.

The trivium included modes of argument and thought: logic, grammar, and rhetoric.

The quadrivium were the sciences, bodies of knowledge with particular content: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.

Brittanica identifies the liberal arts of the modern university as literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.

Wikipedia’s more expansive definition is arguably better: art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

But what are the emergent liberal arts — liberal arts 2.0?

I think the best way to think about this is not to think of the “new” liberal arts as supplanting the “old,” but as a complementary set, like painting, architecture, and sculpture as the new, humanist plastic arts during the Renaissance. Like the trivium and quadrivium, we have the octet of “modern” liberal arts and a set of newer concerns.

With that proviso in mind, here is my fairly conservative attempt at a list:

Art

Design

Photography

Music

*

Languages

Literature

Philosophy

*

History

Politics

Economics

*

Mathematical Sciences

Natural Sciences

Biological Sciences

*

Food, Ecology, and the Environment

—

What do you think?

Update: Let me just clarify that I’m not just using these terms in the way that they’re understood in colleges and universities. So by “economics,” I don’t only mean what you learned in ECON 101 or the work of professional economists, but a broad and flexible consideration of labor, exchange, incentives, and value as they affect… anything.

Likewise “photography” doesn’t just mean snapping pictures but learning how to read, think, produce, and talk about images, whether still or moving. Art is the aesthetic dimension of anything independent from its use. Design is the aesthetic dimension of anything dependent upon its use. And “aesthetic” is about beauty, yes, but also perception. “Food” is about cooking and eating, but also about our relationship to plants and animals and to each other and our industries oriented around nutrition. Maybe “ecology” would be a better (or at least more encompassing) term. Languages includes speaking, writing, typing, and natural and programming languages. And so on.

These are sciences with a body of knowledge, yes, but they’re also ways of thinking about things, the world, individual people, societies. Your average boring object sitting on your desk or table right now can be thought of in terms of its history, its design, its economics, its politics, its physics and chemistry, etc. And if you take a look at the newspapers, blogs, and books you read, they’re usually doing one or more of these right now — reframing a problem that you thought about one way in the light of another.

“Music” or “Astronomy” are still disciplines, but they don’t mean the same thing that they did in the Middle Ages. The liberal arts for the new millenium doesn’t just change what the arts are — it changes what they mean.

Robin’s note: Weird, new comments seem to be broken on this post. Don’t worry, we’ll continue the conversation on another one, soon.

Tim’s note: Comments are back!

It’s just what the title says it is:

Once you start watching TED talks, ordinary life falls away. The corridor from Silicon Alley to Valley seems to crackle, and a new in-crowd emerges: the one that loves Linux, organic produce, behavioral economics, transhistorical theories and

“Life in the eternal hotel” was the phrase I coined on what I think was my first-ever comment on Snarkmarket, now almost five years ago. The idea is to try to push how far we’d be willing to swap ownership of objects for subscribtion to services:

There are some things that we own that we expect to be permanent, or nearly so, and other things that we own that automatically have a limited shelf life: light bulbs being the best example. Nobody names a light bulb because, even if you legally own it, you don’t own it in the sense of having a long-term personal investment: you use it, it breaks, and you throw it away. Speaking of which, I’d love to have services for trash bags, toilet paper, paper towels, printer ink, soap, shampoo, shaving cream, razor blades, deodorant, laundry and dishwasher detergent (or perhaps laundry and dishwashing services?), contact lenses, and (at least sometimes) food. (Not that life in the dorms was all that wonderful.) It’d be great if you could have all of those pumped into your house like gas, water, or electricity…

The question is to what degree people will be willing to accept an impermanent relationship to certain kinds of things. I doubt that there is anything intrinsic to most objects that would preclude us from using them temporarily: our impulse to name or to fetishize comes from our sense of long attachment, rather than the other way around. Of course, there are cultural differences to be overcome. Some people couldn’t see themselves without owning a car, but could easily not own books (instead reading periodicals, at the library, or not at all); for me, despite my Detroitness, it’s now the other way around. A better question to ask is whether we could live without any sense of permanent ownership: life in the eternal hotel.

Kevin Kelly has something similar up today, with a post called “Better Than Owning“:

Sharing intangibles scales magnificently. This ability to share on a large scale without diminishing the satisfaction of the individual renter is transformative. The total cost of use drops precipitously (shared by millions instead of one). Suddenly, ownership is not so important. Why own, when you get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing?

But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it? If you lived inside of the world’s largest rental store, why would you own anything? If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored “downstairs” in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.

The internet is this magic rental store. Its virtual basement is infinite, and it provides omni-access to its holdings. There are fewer and fewer reasons to own, or even possess anything. Via omni-access the most ordinary citizen can get hold of a good or service as fast as possessing it. The quality of the good is equal to what you can own, and in some cases getting hold of it may be faster than finding it on your own in your own “basement.”

Obviously, for beauty of expression and clarity of imagery, I think “eternal hotel” beats “magic rental store.”

But mull this over with me. What is happening here? And what’s happened in the five years between Robin talking about Rhapsody and Kevin Kelly talking about, um, Rhapsody that may have changed how we look at this?