The Philosopher’s Meme

June 2015 - March 2018

Background

I was a co-founder of an experimental online project that eventually grew to have over 200,000 followers on Facebook while I was still an undergrad in college. The Philosopher’s Meme (TPM) consists of a Facebook page, several discussion groups with a combined membership of over 10,000, and a blog/website for publishing articles and resources. TPM also has several related sub-projects such as Gondola. Additional information and links available on the about and resources pages.

My participation involved hands-on engagement with most aspects of the project, especially creating and curating infographics and edutainment content (memes) about philosophy for the Facebook page. I managed social media, designed & coded the website, wrote and edited (mostly edited) articles. I assisted in executive decisions and planning, lead various group research/social initiatives, ran discussion groups and events, and helped lead a small team of volunteer staff members. Additionally, I lectured about our meme research at Humboldt University in 2015. I also created a mock-up publication based on TPM for a design class in school. The masthead I created for that project became the masthead for the official TPM website.

I came into the project not knowing anything about philosophy, thus I was learning about philosophy through the process of making memes and researching/reading in order to translate my readings into memes through which others could learn. It was a radical approach to auto-didactism and community-based, informal learning. My experience heavily informed my interest in memes as a communication form and pedagogical tool, which I explored later during my 6 month Learning Innovation Fellowship at Drexel University, and plan to explore further in future research projects.

TPM was an entirely not-for-profit project done as a labor of love (for fun, friendship & philosophy) during my spare time between schoolwork and work-work in my undergrad years at college.

Lectures, Writings, Research, Etc.

Much of the thinking and writing for this project exists in the discussion groups and is not formally published on the blog. I will eventually be making an effort to formalize and polish old theoretical contributions and post them on my website as full-fledged articles. Here are the ones that were formally published:

Page Content

The Philosopher’s Meme Facebook page is primarily a memepage, and its content consists of educational memes relating to general philosophy as well as the philosophy of memes, specifically. Content can be viewed on the Facebook page.

Below I have separately posted the memes that I personally created for the page, as well as some related ones thrown in. This isn’t a comprehensive list, it just contains some of the more well-known memes, and whatever I stumbled upon in my meme drafts folder last night. Some of these were never posted on the page and many of them were a collaborative effort with other admins and friends. Source imagery not my own.

View post on imgur.com

This page is currently under construction. More will be added soon.