Cyber Liberal Arts

Yet examining closely, what is most unique about each of us may have indeed been diminished: our voices. Often our voices, our unique authors’ voices as we write or speak, our choice of words, priorities, and turns of phrase are completely eclipsed. This happens when the force of social media messages passes through us as if we were just triggered relays, when we default to the surprisingly astute narratives we compose with AI; and when we ride the waves of social media attention as a mindless habit. In some ways we seem to be losing our ability to navigate by the stars of our own choosing. This is not just in social media, but also in our professional writing. Perceiving, maintaining, and preserving our actual voice is what makes the First Amendment of the US Constitution have any worth at all, and our personal relationships fulfilling. There is a set of skills for maintaining our autonomy of thought, action, and creativity. It is the new emerging discipline of the cyber liberal arts. This cross disciplinary set of skills can perhaps shield us somewhat from undue digital manipulation and help us see things more clearly as we move forward into the digital future. Before we look closely at these necessary skills of free thinking in 2025, let’s consider the situation we’re in, and some ancient historical trends that got us here. 

One of my joys as a professor is reading the writings of others. Reading is like stepping into someone else’s mind. When I read even professional research, I can enjoy the eclectic and yet formalized care of writing in a second language. I feel the Appalachian roots visible under the surface of a technical report. In some moments authors reveal their mentors shining through, the context of their research lab providing their frame of reference, and the seminal figures that they relied upon in their formative years. It’s one of the big reasons that I enjoy being the editor-in-chief of The Journal of The Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education, teaching, and engaging with peers in correspondence. Lately though, I am seeing some of these personal and professional characteristics fall out of prose as people move to automated composition with AI, as they trust the grammar check recommendations more than their own writing style, and as the contextual narrative of social media replaces the uniqueness of their more personal journeys evidenced in the prose. Why is this? Perhaps it is not all digital. 

Cyril Mango in the book “Byzantium, The Empire of New Rome” reviewed texts from the first century through the fall of Constantinople and detected a similar shift in prose to what he called a move towards Formulaic Language. People felt increasingly obliged to repeat phrases and structures of formality in order to engage their communities and shield their personal perspectives and critical thinking. Frank terms became riskier as Byzantine society responded to outlying thinkers increasingly with disempowerment, isolation, and violence. It was a loss of voice for European society that they did not begin to recover until the Renaissance. We can see the resurgence of critical and evidence-based thinking in the Renaissance with the use of Lucretius “On the Nature of Things” as portrayed in Alison Brown’s book “The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence.” Even then, this source material for critical thinking had to be shielded from the inquisitors of the day. 

As we look back before the Medieval European Dark Age, maintaining one’s agency and authority was assailed even in the time of the ancient Greeks. The Athenian citizens taught the liberal arts to their children. This helped them maintain broad understanding and the freedom of their thinking. This was in contrast to the Illiberal arts, skills for those who work in servitude or who needed to do “banausic” manual labor like herding cattle or tilling fields as Andrea Wilson Nightingale points this out in “Aristotle on the “Liberal” and “Illiberal” Arts.” The liberal arts topics we think of now, rhetoric, grammar, and dialectics (logic), are strong harmonics to science and critical thinking, our shield against the swaying disinformation of 2025. Geometry and astronomy were taught as a way of holding tangible accountability in the real world on issues of time, land boundaries, and building quality. And music, as Krystyna Bartol delightfully describes in “Charming or Instructing? The Greeks on the Function of Music” was more than just for leisure to the ancient Greeks. It was one of several media for reaching and swaying both the literate and illiterate masses of society. 

As much as we might gain inspiration from the ancient Greeks, we should step back from the romantic delusion that steeping in the ancient Greek liberal arts would be enough to keep our mind free, our voices autonomous, and our contributions to human discourse significant in 2025. While personal critical thinking is necessary, there are more layers we must be aware of, and address now. In the digital media we see daily, what is presented as video evidence cannot be vetted with only logical pondering or group confirmation. It needs to be analyzed by technical means with Deep Fake, other AI image detectors, and more as offered by the MIT Media Lab and others. Engaging reliable resources for this vetting of sources is now necessary if we are to make sure our own voices are not wasted decrying deepfake phantoms or co-opted by a social media bot farms and influencers into unintentionally attacking victims portrayed as criminals. When we look for trusted sources of technical analysis and journalistic processes that can validate sources, it becomes more important to read across our own self-created bubble of digital preference and AI summaries. New ways of presenting news like Ground News are a start at providing polarization self-awareness.  

Beyond news and technical writing, we need to hear other human voices more clearly in their own words. One might argue that daily writing is trivial and does not need our attention. But as in the suiboku-ga paintings of my wife ― a tradition of cherishing the mundane dating back to the Chinese literati, as Steve Roddy points out in Fictional Reconstructions of Literati Identity ― and in the still life paintings of Caravaggio, as Madeline Caniglia so aptly recognizes, it is the in subtleties of the mundane where we are often most profoundly seen by those closest to us and most cherished. Sensitivity to this approach offers recognition and the opportunity for subtle extension of our identity to each other in small things, warm reassurance of our relationships with each other. It’s for this reason that I, the wandering son, still send a few handwritten postcards to my mother each week, a few hand-crafted words full of my presence. As we express ourselves, we might occasionally override our digital toolset that now includes “empowering” AI apps programmed to construct a relevant message under our name. Lawrence Lessig in his Ted Talk “How AI Could Hack Democracy” portrays a future where the level of influence AI rises gradually up this intelligence curve of society until a significant portion of society’s independent voices are silenced, perhaps turned to polarized pawns for politics or mesmerized meme bots for marketing, using Richard Dawkins’ coinage from The Selfish Gene. Yet in the moment when social media recommends a message we may forward, can we pause and consider their biases, perhaps slowing down to re-insert our own words in the comment to make it more ours? Perhaps most insidious, are the highly funded massive psychographic engines reflected in the now normalized effects we saw in Cambridge Analytica incrementally move our values over time to realign our identities with digital inevitability towards those who pay. Can we just step back, read books, and share time with others in the real world? Or are there ways we can master the digital waves in which we swim? 

Addressing these challenges effectively is not something we can call out in a single debate with those of opposing views or recognize by mere internal reflection. It requires a new set of arts we must learn, recognize, and engage to keep our minds free, at least free enough to maintain hold of the meaning in our own lives, and maintain some sense of autonomy over our own actions and the substance of our contributions. 

The Cyber Liberal Arts of course includes our current version of the scientific method and the modern critical thinking that has evolved from the liberal arts from the ancient Greeks. In updating the liberal arts with the advice of King, Gandhi, Freire, and Ida B. Wells we must also ensure our ability to recognize, test, and engage a new set of digital skills, technical tools, and reference resources. Understanding that a foreign influence campaign is swaying national politics can be held somewhat accountable if forensic accounting can trace the financial manipulation of local citizen influencers as the ODNI, FBI, and CISA demonstrated recently, uncovering foreign influence in our elections. Without this technical savvy, we just see Americans exercising their rights to influence campaigns and perhaps honor it as legitimate. At a lower layer of the Internet, cyber forensics is needed to uncover the sources of perpetrators that show up directly in the lives of so many people, intent on extortion like ransomware, identity theft, fraudulent relationships, or other manipulations. Of course we don’t all need to be experts in these fields, but everyone can better understand their information environment if they know enough to recognize experts in these fields, understand how to leverage this technical work. This level of understanding is part of the Cyber Liberal Arts. 

Protecting ourselves from these threats is now, in part, our personal responsibility. The knowledge and skills we need to protect our personal assets and maintain our freedom from intimidation goes way beyond corporate cybersecurity awareness training. Psychographic and other analytical modeling as seen historically in organizations like The Stanford Internet Observatory are necessary to detect the manipulation of sentiment and decision in large populations with recommendation engines and psychograph-based manipulation of feeds. Systematic, regular, and multi-perspective fact checking can also help us engage in this new digital world, intentionally, and reflectively, even as fact checking organizations come under fire. Good journalism and jurisprudence that leverage these Cyber Liberal Arts in deliberation and investigation can be great assets. And as we imbue and develop these practices broadly across our education systems, children can hope for some modicum of freedom, freedom of how they think, to ensure that the voices they share are their own.