Some folks resist the “2.0” tag (or heuristic, as I’ve started to argue), for good reason. That said, great resources continue to emerge from Tim O’Reilly’s meme. Case in point: a terrific podcast on Identity 2.0 from IT Conversations. I wish the visuals were available. To judge from the crowd’s reaction, they must have been a hoot.

Listening to the podcast, I’m struck by how close to a kind of “applied philosophy” these questions are. The question of identity–its nature, extension into the world of alterity, performative vs. essential aspects, and so forth–is ongoing, difficult, and engages many areas of human inquiry, from epistemology to business to law to human rights. How interesting it would be to explore a multidisciplinary combination of communications/rhetoric/philosophy/social science/computer science/add-your-discipline-here courses that could explore such questions. High-speed networked computing, online life, social computing: it’s all civilization, scaled-up and sped-up with a long tail and a slew of acceleration effects, and higher ed’s traditional means of studying, preserving, and innovating within civilization should, with some imagination, be able to get at these vital concerns with exhilarating research and conversation. Most importantly, the new context for these concerns could propel us past some stale parts of the conversation and into fresh areas that could perhaps benefit more sectors of society.

Many institutions already elicit such research and conversation, of course. My question: how long before we find a way to see what’s hidden in plain sight: that such research and conversation should be at the heart of a liberal arts education, indeed that they are another way of thinking about the entire tradition of inquiry within the liberal arts?