Parallel to the development Brockman has labeled the Third Culture (and not altogether separate, although arguing that would require another article), the past thirty years have seen major changes in the way we organize our societies and live our lives, at least those of us in the Western democracies. Nicholas Negroponte, the director of MIT's Media Lab, dubbed the key technological development "Being Digital". Regular Edge readers are unlikely to need any explanation of that phrase, and anyone who does can read Negroponte's 1995 book with that title.

A consequence of Being Digital is that the word, both spoken and written, is no longer the sole primary glue of society. Given readily accessible, networked digital technologies with which people can create and communicate, the word becomes just one in a whole spectrum of thought delivery systems. For creatures (us) that learned to interact long before language came onto the scene, arguably the most significant aspect of today's creative and communication digital technologies is their interactive nature. Being Digital, a revolutionary technological concept, has given rise to an even more significant social development: Being Interactive.

The shift to interactivity has been so recent, so rapid, and (surprisingly) so little discussed, that most readers will almost certainly accuse me of hyperbole when I suggest that the interactive element of digital technologies will bring a major revolution in human artistic and cultural activities. In a world where interactivity, through interactive experience, plays a more fundamental role than the word, writing, literature, and the spoken-word art forms will no longer occupy a privileged place in human culture. (They surely won't go away, or cease to be important. But they will no longer be the sole occupants of the center stage. I also realize that words operate by mediating a form of interaction.)

At Stanford University, surrounded as we are by the world's greatest concentration of cutting edge digital technology companies and the related communication/entertainment industries, some of us have been thinking about what this change means in terms of scholarship and education. What will it mean to be an "educated person" in the Being Interactive world? What will constitute the Core Curriculum in the new liberal arts of the twenty first century and beyond?

That's not a question to resolve in a single article, nor one for which a committee of learned men and women could produce an accurate prediction. Time alone will yield the answer, as social and cultural evolution leads to the emergence of an accompanying shared consensus—a gradual process of recognition and realization. In particular, the Being Interactive world is so different from the World of the Word that there are as yet no agreed upon norms and metrics as to what is "good".

Enter Media X. Media X is a new research initiative, and a novel administrative infrastructure to support it, that Stanford launched recently to try to address some aspects of Being Interactive. Despite the name, Media-X is not a west coast version of the Media Lab. It's not a lab or a center, but a program. A program to study the design and use of interactive technologies—interactive media—using whatever methods and paradigms seem appropriate. The "X" in the title is meant to be read as a variable that can refer to any of those conceptual tools. By being topic centered but discipline grounded, Media X both looks to the future and at the same time remains rooted to the past—to the tried and trusted disciplines that have served us well for so long and therefore provide established methodologies and reliable metrics for quality, and without which the enterprise could easily become a grab bag of superficial "interdisciplinary" approaches.

Eager to avoid the ever present danger of creating over optimistic expectations, Media X was not launched with a great fanfare—no "media" coverage in fact. Instead, we simply talked privately with various key industry leaders for a couple of years and then, early this year, quietly started operations. (The Media X website will go live later this summer.)

Designed to operate in a rapidly changing world, Media X is a highly flexible, virtual enterprise, a dynamic network stretching across the entire campus and beyond to outside ICT industries. The Media-X structure cuts orthogonally across the existing university structure at Stanford—departments, schools, and research centers —and brings together central information themes: language technologies (e.g. natural language processing, semantics, dialogue systems), human-computer interaction (e.g. information organization, conversational agents, collaborative work environments), engineering (e.g. product design, information sensing, robotics), cognitive science (e.g. artificial intelligence, logic, neuroscience, rationality and philosophical foundations), and the artistic execution of mediated interactions (e.g. theater, narrative, computer music, character development, gestures. and the digital art of lighting).

By pulling on intellectual resources from computer science and engineering, through the human sciences to the humanities and the arts, Media X is every bit a Third Culture enterprise. But culture is not our aim. Media X is entirely funded by industry, who see the kind of research being done as key to their future prosperity, and we make no apologies for engaging for the most part in commercially exploitable research. We are very much a Silicon Valley operation, more concerned (as an enterprise) with changing the world than examining the nature of those changes. But because we are made up of individual scientists, engineers, humanists, and artists, each grounded in our own disciplines—our own X's—that examination certainly goes on, and we are definitely aware that the shift to Being Interactive has enormous societal, cultural and educational implications. Not the least being that by the end of the present century, the Third Culture will be the only one there is.

KEITH DEVLIN is a mathematician at Stanford University, and author of The Math Gene. [more....]