Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. He has created a musical piece titled “LADA” for you to enjoy while reading this column.
About a decade ago, I gave a talk at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. It was part of a faculty brown bag lunch series and centered on a theme I called LADA, short for Liberal Arts in a Digital Age. At the time, it was an open-ended conversation, more provocation than proposal, and while I haven’t done anything formal with that title since, the idea never fully left me.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about it again. Much of what we once called the digital future has now become the present. And not all of it is easy to navigate.
Liberal arts, at their core, teach context awareness. They don’t just tell us what happened or how to do something. They ask why it matters, who it affected, when and where it occurred, and how it relates to other ideas. They give us narrative threads, historical framing, and ethical tension. They help us see the shape of the whole, not just its parts.
Lately, that kind of context feels increasingly rare.
The Disappearing Frame
Consider music. Albums once came with liner notes. Not just track titles, but stories about the musicians, the recording process, and the creative choices behind the work. Sometimes they were written by critics or fellow artists. Sometimes by the performer. Either way, they gave the music a frame and a sense of time and place. You weren’t just hearing sound. You were stepping into a world.
Today, most music is streamed without any of that. Listeners skip from one track to the next, often unaware of who made the music, where it was recorded, or what sequence it was intended to follow. The liner notes are gone. So are the concept albums. Even the DJs who once introduced music with commentary and insight have been largely replaced by algorithmic playlists, such as “Chill Tuesday.”
News is another example. Headlines arrive through social media feeds with no surrounding context. We often don’t know where a story originated or how it relates to anything else. There’s no time or space to trace a pattern or reflect on long arcs. Events appear as isolated alerts, then disappear. The result is a kind of narrative amnesia. Everything is urgent, but nothing is grounded.
What’s missing is context. And that is something liberal arts have always provided.
Liberal Arts as Context Engine
Philosophy, literature, history, music, and art are not just academic traditions. They are modes of pattern recognition. They help us understand not only the facts of a situation, but the forces behind them. They help us trace meaning across time. They teach us to see nuance, hold tension, and engage multiple perspectives. In a world driven by surface and speed, these qualities are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Ten years ago, when I first shared the idea of LADA, the digital world was expanding but still somewhat bounded. Tablets in classrooms were new. Online lectures were experimental. Many of us still bought books and CDs and watched live concerts. The changes felt significant but navigable.
Now we are living inside the full acceleration. Students and professionals alike use AI to write essays, generate images, compose music, and code software. Much of this is helpful. Some of it is impressive. But almost none of it invites reflection.
An AI can write a summary, but it won’t ask why a piece matters. A machine can produce a string quartet, but it doesn’t know grief, joy, or longing. These are human dimensions, and they do not scale automatically.
Liberal arts offer more than content. They cultivate discernment. They show us how ideas evolve, how culture shapes knowledge, and how knowledge shapes decisions. In
other words, they help us manage context.
Context Is Quietly Disappearing
The irony is that we now have more access to information than ever before. But without framing and connection, that information can become a blur. Tools have become faster, but our grasp of meaning has not necessarily kept up.
We consume headlines without background, music without liner notes, and ideas without ancestry. We use systems that produce answers but lack the questions that make those answers matter.
Context is quietly disappearing. And because it disappears gradually, we don’t always notice until we are standing in a flattened landscape of facts and fragments, unsure of what ties them together.
This is not a lament about the past or an argument against technology. It is a call to remember what human framing provides. Fast is not always deep. Efficient is not always wise. Tools work best when guided by understanding.
A Thought Worth Revisiting
The idea of Liberal Arts in a Digital Age may have originated as a faculty lunch talk, but it feels increasingly relevant as a lens through which to view the world we now inhabit.
This is not a new campaign or a proposal for educational reform. It is simply a reflection on what might be missing and where we might look to find it again.
A liberal arts education will not make your phone faster or your productivity app more efficient. However, it might help you decide when to turn them off. It might help you notice what your tools are amplifying, what they’re omitting, and what kind of story you are living inside.
It might even help you hear a song in its full context.
And maybe that’s the deeper function of context itself. It reminds us that we are not just observers or users, but participants in a much larger unfolding story. One that needs not just information, but insight.
