When did social media become so wise?
From the dawn of...maybe 20 years ago, people have enjoyed posting quotes from famous ex-presidents and pithy little aphorisms from Mark Twain and Winston Churchill and darling inspirational pick-me-ups frosted in pink and glitter, but lately it feels like a real shift has occurred on my social media feeds. Now I am inundated with quotations from murky, difficult-to-identify sources. It’s as if the magical algorithms have come to life and now speak to me in aphorisms. They want to inspire me. They want to tell me something important about life and how to live it.
Kahlil Gibran, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Twain, Sun Tzu, Albert Schweitzer, Tom Cruise, George Bernard Shaw, Anaïs Nin—they have all been corralled into the great project of making me feel more positive, wise, productive, and hopeful for the future.
Emily Dickinson on Hope. Ernest Hemingway on war. Nietzsche on dealing with exhaustion. Emile Zola on not judging a book by its cover. The great Stoic philosopher Epictetus, reduced to the banality of saying “the true man is revealed in difficult times.” Social media these days is busily surfing the world's literature to find pithy one-liners that are guaranteed not to offend, confound, or provoke. A good quote on social media makes a quick impression and goes down easy, like a little gem from Polonius in Hamlet: “Neither a borrower or lender be.” “To thine own self be true.” That sort of thing.
I do enjoy when one of my friends or connections on social media takes the time to choose and post a quotation to represent their own thoughts or feelings—this is wonderful—but I feel quite differently when the quotations are being fired at me zombie-style from murky entities with names like Philosophaire21, Old Americans Photos, Stoics Philosophy, Shadows Within My Mind, and Dead Poet. Who are these entities? Are these quotes tailored for me, like the targeted ads, or are they doled out evenly across Facebook? I have no clue.
The online experience was just better before the internet discovered it was wise enough to share snippets from the world’s great literary traditions with me. Maybe in its newfound sentience, it has learned some valuable lessons about humans, for example, that most people prefer reading quotes from a book rather than reading the whole book. After all, who needs literature when you can just go right to the greatest hits.
Sometimes it feels like I’m watching social media turn 5,000 years of civilization into bumper stickers, fortune cookies, and inspirational quotes…and it can’t even get the quotes right. Here’s one attributed to George Orwell:
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to violence on their behalf.”
Orwell never wrote or said this, but most people won’t care because they view the internet as a big machine that spits out words and ideas affirming what they already believe.
I prefer the edgier, murkier Web 1.0, where the nasty stuff was right there for you to bump into accidentally and you had to work harder to build and participate in an online community. This new super-curated online experience is exponentially worse because it spoon-feeds me words and ideas, all the while assuming that I want to be wiser, more thoughtful, more righteous—in a word, a better person.
I do in fact want to be a better person, but I prefer to pursue those goals on my own, powered by my own intention. For me, grappling with art, literature, music, history, religion, ethics, and philosophy is how I strive to become better—educating the whole person, by reading whole books. But on Web 2.0 these days, I am forced to witness the digital diminution of literature as it is transmogrified into easy-to-digest aphorisms and inspirational sayings. “The Meaning of life is to find your gift,” Picasso opines. “The purpose of life is to give it away” (Picasso, for his part, did not actually talk like a Hallmark card or a fortune cookie, but the algorithms assume that you won’t care to find out for yourself). Or from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who says the purpose of life “is not to be happy. It is to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Eventually, the chatbots will rewrite that last one to take out the repetition of “to be” and all will be right with the world.
The canonical writers once left tomes behind that you were required to read and ponder, but now you can get advice and life hacks from them without having to order a single book on Amazon. I mean, why try to unpack Maya Angelou’s poetry when you can get her wisdom nuggets delivered to you for free on Facebook: “Do the best that you can until you know better,” she preaches. “Then when you know better, do better.”
Aphorisms from poets are expected to be, well, poetic, or at least elliptical: Seamus Heaney says “Hope is not optimist, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.” Not to be undone in symmetry is Facebook poet Samuel Johnson who warns “Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
From JRR Tolkien we learn that “Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies.” Wonderful, the Gospel according to Treebeard. That must mean Tolkien was an an environmentalist. It stands to reason.
Carrie Fisher, in her most determined-looking Princess Leia pose, urges girls to “Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action.”
Edgar Allan Poe, who is well known for his inspirational prose, tells us “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” Not to be outdone is John Steinbeck, another well-known purveyor of life as a string of beautiful sunsets: “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
Sometimes, rarely, the quote aligns with the writer’s entire oeuvre. Charles Bukowski, whose quotes find their way to me more often than any other, writes that upon reading the want ads, he was “horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.” That is quintessential Bukowski. Finally, a flash of wisdom that isn’t frosted over with sugar and good intentions. And from Dostoevsky: “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” Yes, read enough Dostoevsky and that message comes through loud and clear.
But who wants to read Notes from the Underground or The Brothers Karamozov? Facebook assumes that you don't, not really.
Comments