STEAM for an Unfolding Digital Universe

Class of 2013: STEM and the Liberal Arts in a Digital World

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When I went to school, a stem was a stem, and it played an important role in supporting a flower.Today, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. But I am still going to make the case that its primary role is to support flowers, in this case, flowers that come directly from the liberal arts.

My thesis is a simple one. The disciplines of STEM enable the digital universe. The liberal arts activateit. One provides the infrastructure, the other the content that is communicated across it. Both are required to create the digital fabric that makes up an increasing part of our personal, social, political, and economic lives.

In particular, what activates digital culture are stories.They may be told in words, in songs, in images, or in film, but at the end of the day, it is the quality of these stories and their telling that makes all the difference.

Stories are strange and wonderful things. We give them permission to take over our minds, much the way that software takes over a computer, to construct imagined experiences out of our personal data and feelings. It is hard to imagine a more intimate engagement. You would be very cautious about letting a person get this close, but you are quite willing to allow a song or a film or a story to do so.

As consumers of literature we are exceptionally vulnerable to its effects because we allow it to co-opt our most intimate resources. It is critical therefore that we understand its operations. It is also critical that we understand our responses and how they shape our values, our identity, and our behavior. This is the function of literary studies.

At the same time, we are avid consumers of narratives in every walk of life, from the story-telling of advertising, to the use cases that direct product design, to the business plans that pitch venture investment, to the customer support narratives that guide us through a problem solving process. This is the function of creative writers—regardless of what profession they are in. Business needs to create and refresh lots and lots of narratives all the time. The more that STEM graduates expand and proliferate the digital infrastructure, the more liberal arts graduates are needed to weave the digital fabric.

It is not an accident that Steve Jobs ushered in this decade of change. Steve was a liberal arts major. He teamed at the start with Steve Wozniak, who was a STEM guy. That pairing is iconic. It represents the fundamental unit of digital DNA for the foreseeable future.

So my call to action is a simple one. Regardless of whether you are STEM or liberal arts, pair up and mate! The world needs the offspring of your unions. It does not matter what industry or walk of life you pick—digital is pervasive everywhere, and narratives are core to everything. Simply put, digital artifacts are becoming what life itself is all about. As such, they need to draw on the best traditions from our past to deliver the best we have to offer in the present. That is the opportunity of the current day. Seize it.