Social Media

Milan Kundera, in his classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being undertook a consideration of the ephemeral. So I use it as a springboard for a brief consideration of social media and what is fixed and what is passing about its meaning to us as a self-aware species. Paradoxically that application of the concept slips into a conceptual tesseract as we attempt to hold social media to mean yet another contrivance for fixing our life experiences and then realize that who we were yesterday is not necessarily who we are today nor who we will be tomorrow, nor how we will be remembered once we're gone. To hold its meaning still is to enter a self-referential paradox where the meaning of the thing contradicts the nature of that which it represents and vice versa. All that to say that while it is impossible to confirm whether social media are simulation or simulacra, it is possible to orient their meaning, through how we use them and design them, toward our better natures. If we succeed, it will fix not individuals but our common humanity, which may be the one thing about us that has never been ephemeral

Aesthetics · Ephemeral key · Epistemology · Humanity · Lightness · Social media · Sociology · Yesterday · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Digital Media and Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology · Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry · Artificial Intelligence