First Blog

Here is Part 2 on the topic of social media and what I call imagination-formation. Part 1 can be found here: Becoming What We Behold – Part 1 Hope you enjoy it!

Social Media: A Menace?

In my paper, I considered an anticipated objection: namely, that the use of technology for education, let alone scholarship, is detrimental to learning and to society as a whole. Some such objectors may even cite studies that show how “learning” on technological devices is less effective and perhaps inimical to the process of learning itself. But, as I pointed out (as gently as possible), one must wonder whether such objectors would likewise have complained about the first printings of the Gutenberg press. After all, the printing press too is technology. (On this note, I recently learned by reading Allan Bloom’s classic work The Closing of the American Mind that Nietzsche himself (no friend of Christianity) argued: that “the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern [man]” and that “now television replaced the newspaper.” So, when considered historically, my raising the counter-example of the Gutenberg press seems justified.)

Yet the objection, presumably, isn’t that technology as such is detrimental. Rather, the argument is that every technology has a particular mode that is inherent to it, and that the mode inherent to the technology of television is antithetical to education. Education is not entertainment. Scholarship is not social. More to the point, the objection seems to go: the ideology embodied in a book is different from, indeed superior to, the ideology embodied in social media.

Social Media: A Means To Beauty

But, I went on to argue, what’s the alternative? The sites of social media aren’t going away anytime soon, just as TV didn’t go away for now nearly a century. And if they do, they will only be replaced, no doubt, with something even more “inimical” to scholarship. So what is the alternative? Perhaps we could, rather than spurn social media as anti-academic, seek to repurpose and redeem social media for the sake of scholarship, for the sake of truth, goodness, and beauty.

I concluded by suggesting that posts on social media, whether intended to or not, put out aesthetic articulations to which human imaginations are deeply attracted and by which they are continuously formed. Social media shape human hearts which in turn shape human action and ultimately entire societies. Such is evidenced in everything from the rise of social anxiety and teenage angst (owing largely to the phenomenon of FOMO—Fear of Missing Out) to political revolutions (e.g., the Arab Spring) and social justice protests (e.g., the #MeToo movement). If this much is true, it behooves the concerned scholar—who sees her scholarship not so much as privilege, but as responsibility—to engage today’s platforms of knowledge-dissemination and imagination formation, i.e., social media.

Truth abhors a vacuum. Should what is true remain largely in the ivory towers of academia, then the wide world of social media by default will be filled with vacuous chatter: the critic’s complaint will become prophecy. So, for the sake of the guild—where truth is to be investigated and disseminated—scholarship must be social. We will be shaped by what we love; and what we love in turn will be shaped by what we behold. Why wouldn’t we, whose work is to arrive at or at least approximate truth as best we can, display our work so that it may be beheld in order that it may be loved?