Liberal Arts in an Information Age

As much as blue-eyed technocrats herald the new opportunities that split-second communication via cell towers and the Internet afford us for accessing information, I haven’t heard much discussion about what we do with that information, and how our ability to instantly access it affects us.  The major trend I see is that we do at the start of the Information Age what we did at the end of the Industrial Age: consume.  With air-conditioned servers ready to zap the next article, image, or video to us, we involve ourselves in a process so rapid that we don’t have the time to reflect on our stance towards the information we’re consuming.

So while the Internet is responsible for enabling like-minded people across the world to join up, and while it certainly has increased our overall awareness of the diversity of opinions, values, and beliefs in our big ole world, I think it’s just as responsible for undermining our ability to discuss those positions.  With the answers supposedly at our fingertips, we don’t have the time to become uncomfortable with our ignorance.  Before we can even sit with our question long enough to worry whether we’re asking the appropriate one, or the right one, or what the presuppositions that went into that question actually were, we’re reading the first sentence of what we’ll adopt as our conclusion.  We get our pre-fabricated answers quickly, and with a few clicks or taps we’re on our way to making a new opinion out of it.  But the Internet’s effect is seen beyond the bezels of LCD screens, particularly as political, religious, and cultural groups have begun to seal themselves hermetically from their opponents.  To a Tea Party type, a garden variety Democrat is a scandalous, lying communist.  The garden variety Democrat, who is certainly not a communist and tries not to lie, sees the Tea Partier as a fascist, all the more dangerous because the Tea Partier has no serious definition of what fascism actually means.  That’s a very obvious example, of course, but you can find those kinds of divisions at work through all kinds of debates occurring today.

The incredible access to information we have through the Internet seems to reduce the value of the liberal arts, particularly the more central disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, since nice sounding answers to complex and specific questions can be obtained instantly.  The repeated readings of texts, the practices of taking and reviewing notes, the desire to seek out alternative opinions as a way of forming one’s own?  These seem hopelessly archaic when we can Google our way out of confusion.  But liberal arts don’t feed us knowledge, at least not primarily, but they teach us how to know.  The arts encourage us to view knowledge as a craft, not as a consumer good, and like any craft, success requires a process of apprenticeship.  So the liberal arts might be marginalized publicly, and parents might send their kids to college to get medical or engineering degrees, but if it’s knowledge you want, and not just information, the liberal arts are as important as they’ve always been.

• Liberal Arts