By Bill Schlotter

	English scholar Alan Liu turned cultural detective in tracking down what is cool.

What is cool? The answer, says Alan Liu, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, depends entirely upon whom one asks.

“Cool is many things,” says Liu. “But right now, it has to do with technology and information. What particularly interests me is what I call information cool and, more generally, technological cool.”

In “The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information,” published recently by the University of Chicago Press, Liu examines the influence of cool on popular culture, education, and the high-tech, knowledge-work corporate world where what’s cool is at times at odds with what is required or necessary.

Liu lays out the book’s points of inquiry in its introduction. “What is knowledge work?” he asks. “How does information work sustain it? And how might the culture of such information—self-named ‘cool’—challenge knowledge work to open a space, as yet culturally sterile…for a more humane hack of contemporary knowledge.”

“The Laws of Cool” also looks at the academy and the relevance of arts and humanities classes to its students.

“This book is about our students and what the arts and humanities are training people to do,” Liu said. “There is a kind of immense disconnect right now between our cool students and ourselves as educators.”

More and more Americans are employed each year in what is called knowledge work, Liu said. Knowledge work is computer-based “head work.” Knowledge workers don’t create anything tangible. They don’t build or grow a product. They don’t pack or transport it. Instead, seated at their computers, they advertise it, market it, finance, insure it, or manage it.

“Knowledge work is very high level, very technical, very advanced head work,” Liu said. “It is in charge of the entire emerging sphere of what they call service work, which manages and insures and communicates products.”

The same people who use high-tech equipment to work also use that equipment to participate in culture. They listen to CDs; watch DVDs; play video games; visit Web sites. In this process they reject things already appropriated by mainstream culture, Liu said—things such as literature and the arts.

In a similar way, they reject wholesale assimilation into corporate structure, adopting slightly quirky behaviors as a way of declaring their independence.

“I sort of see that as being the implicit ethos or attitude of cool today, ” Liu said. “I’m not quite subversive, but my behavior asserts that I’m me and not just part of this corporation, or this team.”

Such behavior poses a challenge for business and for education, he said. In “The Laws of Cool,” he proposes some solutions. “That means trying to show them that the things society values—history, for example—can be just as cool as popular culture and media.”

Might such a collaboration produce a really cool professor? “We will never be cool enough for our students,” Liu said. “But it would be nice to show them that cool has a history and that historical consciousness and humanistic knowledges—literature, the arts, and so on—can themselves be cool.”