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The Philosophy of Social Media

         
Just over ten years ago the internet pre-Mark Zuckerberg, was like a barren moonscape, being visited by no one other than some type of Star Trek characters, who no one thought could possibly succeed in their mission.  Things really became even more space age to the common man with the advent of Twitter, Linkedin and many other vehicles (Michael & Peter, 2011).

From the very start no one thought any of this could last, let alone go to some fifty million online users and perhaps five hundred million Facebook members, along with Twitter at one hundred and ninety million signed up.  What this all tells us is that not only is social media here to stay, but it is an undeniable presence.  It saturates the very fiber of our being in our personal, business and in a big way, big way our social lives. 

In the past ten years there have been vast changes in the Social Media landscape that changed the particular ways in which Philosophers exchange their creation and circulation of Philosophy.  This paper will explore, discuss and attempt to interpret how Social Media and Philosophy intercept across the millions of users around the globe.  Furthermore, it will argue that Social Media can be said to be, a modern window on the philosophy of the current millennium.

            

We can ask ourselves the question, why it is, a number of thinkers, key to each discipline of Social Media and Philosophy, at this early stage of development, are so keenly unaware of the haunting possibilities that lie before them in this new millennium.  

These possibilities through Social Media, and human curiousness can become even more aware and enlightened.  Through the lens of Social Media and sharing of the Philosophers' corner we can communicate, the many messages of Philosophy both past and present.

            

Let us face the fact that Digital Media is not a fad, and is not going away.  All the literature and even today's reality supports it.  So it would be a good thing for a discipline like Philosophy to continue to work more and more with this in mind.  It is already doing this to some extent, but it needs to go much further.  Let us look at how pervasive Social Media really is in our lives.

            

Let us look at how pervasive Social Media is in our lives.  Our old cultural ideas, and ways of communicating, have been replaced by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram who are in the business of overtaking our languages, Philosophies, and in general, what we think about ourselves and life itself.  

           

There is one other wrench that can come in the wide world of Social Media known as pressure groups who seek to disrupt the norm of the social flow.  They can come in, in the form of internet piracy, according to Bernard Stiegler and his talks with Jacques Derrida, the Philosopher.  These two French thinkers say that the pirates change the terms of the social contract with things like ‘Hacktivism’!  They can try to disrupt regular networks therefore giving themselves greater power to share their data with outside groups.  Having Philosophical ideas aired and talked about on the Social Media platform is a win, win, situation for the intellectuals on both ends of the equation.

"Stiegler who acts out what it means to be a radical Philosopher or critical Theorist by writing and publishing in this fashion.  Much the same can be said of Catherine Malabou, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek, - in fact of most thinkers of contempory culture, media and society today.  This point even applies to those theorists of digital media who know how to code and produce experimental e-literature such as Wendy H.K.Chun, Alexander R. Galloway and N. Katherine Hayles" (Hall, 2013, P. 88).

This all stems from Stiegler's idea that the original technical origin of anything like smartphones, films, tablets, photography and even the World Wide Web, undermines the humanist conception of the self.

"If in Alexander R. Galloway's words, 'one must today focus special attention on the way control acts on the realm of the "immaterial": knowledge work, thought, information and software, networks, technical memory, ideology, the mind, in order to follow Stiegler in shifting' from a Philosophy of "what is" (being ontology) to a philosophy of "what does"' (what effects, what cares, which is a question of practice, ethics, politics) - then taking Gilles Deleuze's idea seriously as a critique of political economy must surely involve paying careful critical attention to our own modes of production and ways of living, working, acting and thinking as theorists and philosophers" (Hall, 2013, p. 89).

Many institutions of higher learning, thanks to a couple of research arms of assessments and framework, give University Professors lighter teaching loads. Many more are given sabbaticals so that they may generate income from government, by their research, for their institutions.  The Professors who engage and are successful in these types of endeavors, generally get even more sabbaticals.  This only increases the huge gap between the haves and the have not's in the world of academia.

The result of this, according to Stiegler, is a process of causation; or a net loss of knowledge.  This could also be referred to in Philosophical terms as 'what takes work beyond employment'!  This then leads to the demoralization of other individuals in the institution.

It has become more and more difficult for people in Academia, including all University life, to escape for some time away from school.  We have become such a connected society, by way of our Social Media lifestyle that thinking about life itself has become a very difficult art, until something major comes along to interrupt the Philosophical mind set or stream of thinking. 

Ten years ago, being on the internet was associated mostly with firewalls and security concerns. These concerns are still with us today and most organizations look at the risk factors involved, mainly because they fear their own data being lifted from another’s search engine when not enough protection is in place on their computer (Jacka, 2011).

            
Social Media has brought about a whole different need for risk assessment for any organization.  The number one concern for a company is putting its reputation out there much more often, and much more deeply exposed; than it could have before the internet and social media.  Any large or for that matter even small organization needs to control a positive conversation about its branding and image.  Social Media is not just a company to one consumer conversation or a Government to one citizen example.  It is a conversation to million, or you could even say a ‘million to one’ talk, that could net you a positive image for many years even decades to come (Jacka, 2011).  Despite the enormity of this tectonic shift, little is done to protect organizations from the threats associated with exposure on these social net- working sites.

            
A recent survey was done by a New York based public relations firm Weber Shandwick, http://www.webershandwick.com/ where approximately one third of the one hundred and twenty-seven chief executive officers said that their companies got social media based reputation threats sometime in the last twelve months.  Sometime after these incidents, almost sixty-seven percent said they had no plan nor any type of preparation to deal with these types of threats (Jacka, 2011).  This same Shandwick organization continued its report saying that the ability to safeguard an organization’s reputation drives sixty-three percent of that same firm’s market value.  If this reputation is lost, the possibility of rebuilding is neither a short term one, nor easy.  

Normally it takes approximately three to three and a half years, according to the experts.  Usually, today’s internal auditors can get an idea about the risk factors involved in just how the company, organization or even government branch deals with its risk factors in social media.  These things can be assessed quite easily by looking at organizational flow charts and long and short term strategies or even the lack thereof (Jacka, 2011).

            

The most fundamental risk for any type of organization is to go head long into Social Media strategy with a type of helter-skelter attitude.  Any organization can spend huge amounts of resources filling up their departments with advertising, public relations and communication departments, only to find that success, because of a no strategy formula, has eluded them.  Especially when it comes to the fairly new media of Social Media, this area must be carefully constructed or it may lead to a deconstruction of many years of hard work.  Social Media is the new business paradigm and must be regarded as such.  It can be your best friend or your worst nightmare.  It must be treated with the utmost respect (Jacka, 2011).

            

Not many will agree that today we are living in the age of the information revolution.  In all information systems, whether the internet, social media, corporate or even governmental, we have witnessed that revelation, come in the form of these words ‘Information is Power’.  This saying, trite as it may seem, has the ability to convert kings, all the way downward to commoners causing them to finally have to think.  Such thinking has turned the Governments of our world upside down with the development of insiders like Wikileaks and Edward Snowdon (Bora, 2012).

Scholars who constantly study Social Media look at it a trans-warp that is constantly changing.  The rapidness of these changes hardly leaves any scholar time to look at the evidence before the spaceship leaves the dock. Regardless of the facts facing them, all the scholars are in agreement about one overriding factor, and that seems to be that facing the constant challenge of never ending change at a rapid fire pace, is difficult to overcome.  Just on a relatively simplistic level, publication times, continue to be slow when compared to the overall rapid transformation in Social Media (Hogan & Quan-Hassie, 2010).

When we think of Social Media in our everyday lives it is almost impossible to do so, because Social Media theory, its practices, and even the understanding of the most popular sites, are always fluctuating.  Therefore, we can determine from this that anything we are doing today in Social Media could be obsolete tomorrow (Hogan & Hassie, 2010)

There is, however, an answer, and that is the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society which deals with ‘persistence and change’ in Social Media by compiling papers in a series that identify many of the elements of Social Media practice that are persistent with platforms, cultures as well as users.  These papers try to give us research pointing towards knowledge of the long term line of sight of Social Media, its usage and where its development is taking it.  It would seem because Social Media is such a movable object, it becomes very difficult to answer research questions in any solid way, however, we can list only a few that seem to have found some stability:

• Strong, intimate social relationships online also tend to be strong, intimate social relationships offline (Dutton, Helsper, & Gerber, 2009; Ellinson, Steinfield & Lampe, 2007; Hampton, Sessions, Her, & Rainie, 2009 as cited in Hogan & Quan-Hasse, 2010)
• People who tend to communicate more online also tend to do so offline (Quan-Hasse, 2008; Wellman, Quan-Hasse, Witte, Hampton, 2001, as cited in Hogan & Quan-Hasse, 2010).
• The distribution of contacts will always be skewed with few friends being close and the majority being weak (Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzales, Wimmer, & Christakis, 2008; Roberts, Dunbar, Pollet, & Kuppens, 2009, as cited in Hogan & Quan-Hasse, 2010)
• There will be a gap between what users say they do and what they actually do, as the investigation of privacy concerns on social network sites has shown (Gross & Acquisti, 2005; Young & Quan-Husse, 2009, as cited in Hogan & Quan-Hasse, 2010).

The World Wide Web is the universal space of information, via Uniform Resource Identifer's (U.R.I).  However the Philosophical problems of reference and meaning that have been a source of debate, especially within the Philosophy of Language return. When the web itself is given as the foundation of knowledge or even a representation of the semantic web itself.  Debating seemingly goes back and forth in this almost endless cycle of life between semantic web and its referential state of the U.R.I. are forever explored; to getting all the way down to the real crucial moments about meanings and even referential names in the Philosophy of Language.

There are three main thrusts of the argument and they are as follows:

1. The logical position, as shown by the descriptive theory of reference.
2. The straight on reference position, as shown by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam's casual theory of reference.
3. Wittensteinian position that takes the view that all U.R.I.'s are a public language, as we can readily see by web research engines; just by doing one rather simple search.

All three of these positions show the fact that in the world of computer science the discussions with the Philosophy of Language are flourishing quite well when it comes to the World Wide Web. (Haplin, 2011).

         It would seem that out of all the Philosophers and even so called experts in computer science the name that keeps coming to the forefront in my research is Ludwig Wittenstein (1889-1951).  After looking at Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke, Gottlob Frege, and even John Locke, for his views, nobody tops Wittenstein when it comes to the Theory of Language. 

Frege (1892) claimed that our sense was automatically objective, "the reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by using it; the idea which we have in that case is wholly subjective, in between lies the sense, which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself" (Frege, 1892, as cited in Haplin, 2011, p. 19).

Another Philosopher Michael Dummett gives us insight, when he says that "Frege's theises, the sense is objective and is certainly an anticipation of Wittenstein's doctrine of meaning use" (Dummett, 1993, as cited in Haplin, 2011, p. 19).  So in the final analysis of this when we look at "mean as use" as its foundation, one that is rooted in computer science by way of usage of U.R.I.'s mostly in web scale information retrieval (Wittenstein, 1953 as cited in Haplin, 2011).

         If the Philosophers including Steigler are correct about our awareness of time and the epochal changes in media ecology, it will be through Social Media rather than because of it, that the various Philosophies of mankind open the window to the soul of our existence in the new millennium.   

Philosophy and Social Media working together:

During my research I came across this video which I believe could help academics to utilize the Social Media tools available today, in collaborative research in Philosophy with Undergraduate research assistants.

The Research Circle

from Christopher Long 1 year ago / via iMovie / 

Creative Commons License:

 

by

 

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 NOT YET RATED

Christopher Long, Professor of Philosophy and Classics and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State, outlines the process by which he engages in collaborative research in philosophy with undergraduate research assistants.

Top 10 Philosophy Blogs:

http://certaindoubts.com/

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/
http://www.leiterreports.typepad.com/
http://manyulim.wordpress.com/
http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/
http://www.philosophyetc.net/
http://publicreason.net/
http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/
http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com.au/

References:

Bora, A. (2012) Journalism in the 21st Century World - Tracking Challenges. Mediterranean       Journal of Social Sciences 3.1: 393-400

      Retrieved 15th. March, 2014 from                 http://searchproquest.com.ezproxy.bond.edu.au/docview/1369753300

Hall, G. (2013) #Mysubjectivation. New Formations: A Journal of culture/theory/politics,          Volume 79, pp. 83-102. DOI: 10.398/NEWF.79.05.2013

Haplin, H. (2011)  Sense and Reference on the Web. Journal for Artifical Intelligence,      
       Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Retrieved 1st. February, 2014, from
  http://link.springer.com.ezproxy.bond.edu.au/article/10.1007%2Fs11023-011-9230-6 

Hogan, B. & Quan-Haase, A. (2010) Persistence and Change in Social Media.  Bulletin of           Science Technology & Society 30:309 

       DOI: 10.1177/0270467610380012 Retrieved 14th.March, 2014 from       http://bst.sagepub.com/content/30/5/309 

Jacka, J. (2011) The Whole World's Talking. Internal Auditor 68(3), 52-56. 

Long, C. (2013) The Research Circle. Retrieved 31st.March, 2014 from from   http://vimeo.com/43797605

Long, C. (2011) Christopher P. Long's Eportfolio.  Collaborative Research in Philosophy.
        Retrieved 31st.March, 2014 from
  http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/cplportfolio/2011/07/collaborative-research-in-   phil.html 

"To Thine own self be true"

Shakespeare Quote - "To thine own self be true"

Polonius:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3

Famous Shakespeare Quote
Although set in different times many of the most famous quotes about life and love by William Shakespeare are still relevant today.  Did you know that William Shakespeare is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the introduction of nearly 3,000 words into the language. It's no wonder that expressions from his works in literature, including the "To thine own self be true" quote, are an 'anonymous' part of the English language. Many people continue to use this "To thine own self be true" quote by William Shakespeare in famous quotes about life.

• NAME: William Shakespeare
• OCCUPATION: Playwright, Poet
• BIRTH DATE: c. April 23, 1564
• DEATH DATE: April 23, 1616
• EDUCATION: King's New School
• PLACE OF BIRTH: Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom
• PLACE OF DEATH: Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom
• NICKNAME: "Bard of Avon"
• NICKNAME: "Swan of Avon"
• AKA: Shakspere
• AKA: Will Shakespeare
• NICKNAME: "The Bard"
• http://www.biography.com/people/william-shakespeare-9480323
• 
  

According to Hobbs

"'In a state of nature' the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (Thomas Hobbs 1588-1679)

Self-Quiz

1. Self Quiz...According to Hobbs

Centre of the Universe

We cannot live our lives as though we are at the centre of the universe or it revolves around us.  If we do, we run a high risk of becoming like the maple leaf. In the spring of its life, the maple leaf is green and full of life.  It seems to have life eternal, perhaps all knowing even.  When placed in the palm of ones hand and crushed, it easily springs back.  However when that same maple leaf reaches the fall of its life, has turned its many beautiful but somewhat darker colours, how does it react when placed in the palm then.  It is crushed.

Looking for an Honest Man

The famous Greek Philosopher Diogenes of Sinope also known as Diogenes the Cynic, thought of himself as a Herculean figure.  He used a simple lifestyle to critize the values of institutions of what he saw was a corrupt society.  He lived in virtual poverty but was known for playing philosophical tricks. One such famous trick was he carried a lamp during the daylight hours claiming to be looking for an honest man. 






The Teachings of Diogenes
Diogenes the Cynic from Sinope who lived in a Tub
Diogenes...Looking for an honest man

A Philosopher once said...

Heraclitus > Quotes > Quotable Quote

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

― Heraclitus

The river and the man are constantly flowing and changing each day.  In fact the more we think about it the only thing in life that is truely constant is change. However, proceed with caution, because wherever you go you take YOU with YOU and you could end up in deep water.... Paul