Alan Liu’s new book The Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information looks really interesting. I’ve put in a purchase request at our library, and am thinking of buying it myself. (If it were in stock at the Brown Bookstore, it would’ve been an impulse purchase. Luckily for my finances, they’re fresh out.)

The ultimate message of The Laws of Cool is that “cool” may be the most authentic response of contemporary culture to postindustrial knowledge work because it holds open a reserve of counter- or anti-knowledge (an “ethos of the unknown”), but nevertheless in its current form cool is often also know-nothing, narrow, shallow, self-centered, cruel, and coopted. Laws of Cool posits that the task of the humanities and arts at the present time is to educate the cool to use technology in a way that mediates between knowledge work and a fuller lifework glimpsed in historically other lives and works.

I liked this quote so much that I printed it out. It’s so easy to get carried away in the flashy-toy aspect of technology, especially before we have a good idea of what kind of work and expertise is required in order to use the flashiest of tech toys. It’s more challenging, and I think more interesting, to make things that are both elegant and supremely useful; either one of these taken separately is a common occurrence, but together they can be hard to find.

I look forward to reading Alan’s book. Thanks for the pointer, Scott!