Ryan Paul in an Ars Technica article, Byte-sized stories: Twittering a tiny tale, wonders about philosophy and microblogging:
Microblogging can clearly work with fiction, but what about more substantive works, like philosophical treatises? In a moment of intoxication inspiration, I came up with a quick Python one-liner1 to compute how many lines in an English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s celebrated “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” are 140 characters in length or less. I discovered that a bit under half of the lines are short enough to be Twittered (and, as the philosopher would say, what we cannot Twitter, we must pass over in silence).
In my own case, twittering philosophy has so far wholly consisted in mocking philosophers, gossiping about them, and git commit messages, thanks to GitHub’s service hooks. Perhaps others can offer tweets with more substantive philosophical content. After all, aphorism is not unknown to philosophy—the pre-Socratics and Nietzsche come to mind. For now, teh interwebs await a latter day Heraclitus.
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The Python-one liner:
len([l.strip() for l in open("tractatus.txt").readlines() if len(l.strip()) <= 140 and l.strip() != ""])↩
{ 1 } Comments
“What we cannot Twitter, we must pass over in silence”, Ha ha! That’s a great line :)
Would be interesting to see if philosophy twittering could get beyond aphorism and mocking. Certainly I’m yet to do otherwise, my only philosophy related tweet so far was merely mocking a typo by David Chalmers, It’s hard to see how anything philosophically significant could really be expressed in 140 chars, but I only started using twitter yesterday, so still holding out hope :)
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