Social Media and Our Soul
Since the advent of FaceBook and SmartPhones, social media have transformed the way we live. In this course we will examine the impact of social media on our soul. We shall look at the good, the bad, and the ugly dimensions of social media and how they affect different generations of Americans. Notions of tribalism, cyber bullying, decline of civility, as well as community building, cyber intimacy, and solidarity will be examined. Furthermore, we shall look at the immediate future and where we might be headed as a society. By intersecting our work with different theories of consciousness, we will examine how our personal and collective souls are affected by social media.
Tony Kashani, Ph.D. is an American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic. Kashani is a subject matter expert and faculty, for several universities in the United States, focusing his interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice. He was born in Tehran to Azerbaijani parents, an ethnic minority in Iran. He grew up speaking Farsi and Turkish, and after migrating at the critical age of fifteen to his adopted home of California, English became his primary language of intellectualism. Speaking three languages and being aware of three distinctly different cultures at once gave Kashani the impetus to seek a philosophy of cosmopolitanism, where one embraces all cultures and is at ease in most countries in the world. He received his bachelor’s degree in radio and television and later his master’s degree in cinema studies from San Francisco State University. He holds a PhD degree in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California Institute of Integral Studies. His writing, teaching, and intellectual activism are anchored in critical theory and pedagogy, influenced by writers such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, and Steinbeck, and thinkers such as Fredrick Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Ferrier, Edward Said, Henry Giroux, John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Erich Fromm, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Kashani is the author of five books including Movies Change Lives: A Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation (Peter Lang Press, 2016). His chapter on Critical Media Literacy in the 3 volume Handbook of Critical Pedagogy (2020, Sage Publications) is a deliberation on the impact of new media on the human condition. Dr. Kashani’s personal website is www.tonykashani.com His podcast address (also available on iTunes and Apple Podcasts) is www.techumanity.online