What Are New Liberal Arts?

We just have to spend a few words on the recently published book ‘New Liberal Arts’ by the Snarkmarket network. Andrew Fitzgerald states:

“In this digital world, your attention, once in abundant supply, has become ‘sex’ increasingly scarce… Now, what did you take away from that sentence? Was it the thesis to this program? Or was it something else? You, my dear student, are going to need to study attention economics.”

This phrase is copied from the chapter ‘Attention Economies’ within the New Liberal Arts book. Attention economies is besides ‘Food‘, ‘Mapping‘, ‘Brevity’, ‘Play‘ and ‘Creativity’ one of the themes of this rather mysterious book. The idea, roughly is to collectively identify and explore twenty first century ways of doing liberal arts. The actual question that the book puts forward is what would that be, new liberal arts? And what sort of themes and topic will be involved? The book deals with the main transformations we face as a society and addresses the issue of how to re-approach them. The emerging themes are declared to be part of New Liberal Arts. In fact, the book is about fresh ideas, getting inspired and solving the case. It’s about thinking and action in a transforming world.

The book is worth reading and generates right from the start a new perspective towards interesting and modern themes. Here is a little freebie: the PDF version of the book. As written in the introduction, feel free to spread the book.

“If you’re reading this as a PDF: We hope you enjoy it. And we hope you send it to your friends and anyone else you think might enjoy it, too. After all, what’s the point of a free digital copy if you don’t, well, copy it? If you’re reading this as a physical book: We hope you enjoy it, too. This beautiful object is our way of keeping faith with the past. For all this fuss about new-ness, we know the score: Books are pretty great techne. Also, use your bookmark. It has a secret.”

If you want your own hard copy of the book: too bad. There were only 200 of them and they were sold out in just eight hours.