Social Media, Micro-Blogging, and Micro-Philosophy
Most of our knowledge of the Presocratics—Greek philosophers prior to Socrates, such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus—comes from the numerous quotes and fragments from their work which were quoted by other philosophers. Even the lost works of well-known ancient philosophers, such as the lost treatises of Aristotle, are known to us chiefly because of fragments and quotes by other philosophers and historians.
While works of philosophy are no longer in danger of being lost, except perhaps in their cultural importance in these decreasingly philosophical times, ironically quotes and fragments from philosophers are once again on the rise thanks to the increasing importance of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) as a means of disseminating philosophical insights and wisdom to the masses. Thanks to tools like Canva, it is possible to create a very professional-looking image or meme containing a quote from a famous philosopher in only a few minutes. These images can then be shared with the world at large through any number of social media platforms.
Arguably the days of long-form content consumption are gone. In the age of social media, attention spans are shorter, windows of opportunity to get your content seen and read are fewer, and content consumers expect their content to be more visually stimulating than even the most beautiful of blog posts or most in-depth of journal articles. The lesson is clear: if you want to make an impact in terms of getting the general population to think more philosophically, long-form philosophy content is not going to cut it. Instead the challenge is to find a way to make the maximum philosophical impact with the fewest number of words and with the most visually satisfying accompanying images.
Some philosophers may lament this cultural shift in the nature of content consumption, philosophical or otherwise. I, too, wish that the average person on the street would read more books, think more abstractly, read more of my blog posts, and dedicate some portion of their lives to the love of wisdom—that philosophical bug (a gadfly perhaps?) by which philosophers throughout time have been bitten. We philosophers know, however, that most people are still living in their own personal versions of Plato’s Cave (Republic, Book VII). They are content with shadows on the wall, their own comfortable but likely false beliefs, and with their short attention spans so necessary for focusing on the things in life that matter most to them, however petty and insignificant those concerns may seem to those more philosophically inclined.
This says to me that if we want to make a genuine philosophical impact with the average non-philosopher, we philosophers need to do a much better job with our philosophy social media campaigns. We need to be bombarding social media sites with every nugget of philosophical wisdom, every philosophical insight, every quotable phrase, every pithy aphorism, and every immutable truth we can think to share. And we need to make it fun to read and beautiful to look at in the process. We philosophers need to worry about public relations as much as Plato if we want to bring philosophy to the masses and keep it alive for future generations.
Hence, the return of the philosophical fragment as a standard form of philosophy content consumption. Even if the average Instagram user never reads another word of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, he or she might pick up a life-changing insight from a beautiful-looking Instagram meme containing a fragment or a quote by Marcus Aurelius, and it might even go viral, disseminating philosophy more effectively than Marcus Aurelius himself could ever have dreamed of.
We philosophers may lament the loss of general attention span for long-form philosophical thought, dialogue, and philosophical reading. But I think those who worry about such things, myself often included, also underestimate the power wielded by an idea that is inherently inspiring or thought-provoking. I care less about whether someone actually reads Marcus Aurelius, for example, than whether he or she is genuinely thinking about the philosophical issues that he, or any other philosopher for that matter, wrote and thought about.
Long-form reading is not necessary to stimulate genuine philosophical thought, which most philosophers come across as wildly pretentious in denying or when they fancy themselves to be above the fray of popular or social media. No, we need to leave our ivory tower and start spreading philosophical wisdom of any form to the masses, just as Christians have their social media game on in the sharing of this, that, and the other daily Bible verse. We philosophers need to evangelize, and we need to warm up to social media to get the job done!
Getting into the spirit of things, I took the time to create a Canva account for myself and to create my very first Instagram image/meme containing a quote from Marcus Aurelius. It’s very likely that more people will see this image when I share it on social media than will ever read a single word of this very blog post. Thus this tiny fragment of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations arguably has more power to change the world than our overly verbose philosophical blog posts, journal articles, dissertations, treatises, and books combined. We philosophers need to get with the times in terms of how the average person, and likely the average student as well, consumes content in the age of social media, and we need to start blowing up our social media accounts with philosophical wisdom and insight of all sorts.
Just as the works of the Presocratics survived because later philosophers thought to quote their works as fragments, we today are in the analogous position of keeping philosophy alive by sharing philosophical quotes, snippets, and fragments, perhaps the only way to inspire the average person to give a tinker’s dam or a single moment’s thought to Plato, Aristotle, or Marcus Aurelius, to say nothing of the more obscure philosophers whose names are barely recognizable to anyone besides philosophy teachers and students. We really do have the power to make every philosophical idea or concept much more accessible to the masses. But to do so we have to get out of our stuffy classrooms, lecture halls, and offices and acquaint ourselves with how the average social media user likes to engage with content and ideas.
The challenge is not to explain difficult philosophical concepts with even more words that no one will read, but to present and frame philosophical fragments in such a way that they really do speak for themselves to any rational person—or even the irrational ones!—who encounter them on social media, in such a way that the impact of the encounter, the intersection between idea and social media user, is immediate, penetrating, and unavoidable.
So, without further ado, here is my very first attempt at a philosophical fragment for social media, created with Canva. Enjoy!
(Quote from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Book VII, Number 30)
