Facebook and Twitter Changing Lives Like the Great Social Media Forums of Enlightenment Salons
Posted: Wednesday, April 13, 2011
by Chris Kanyane
Global Center For Research World Wide
The beginning of the 18th century saw the publishing of the first dictionary of the French Academy. The dictionary defined the philosophe as one or all of these things: a student of the sciences, a wise person who lives a quiet life, a person who by free thought puts himself or herself above ordinary duties and obligations of civil life.
The primary focus of the salon was partly to provide a social platform for friends to amuse one another and partly for friends to refine and inform each other on their status updates on tastes, thereby in a social way increasing their knowledge through social conversation. These social forums followed Horace’s definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate" ("aut delectare aut prodesse est"). Conversation was the key primary activity of the salon.
In these salons you found eloquent tastes discussed and adapted to the age of Mozart and to the host of influential women who helped to make opinion and spread it abroad. Women like Julie de Lespinasse, Horace Walpole's friend, Madame du Deffand; Madame Necker, in whose salon her daughter, who was to eventually become Madame de Stael. Greatest of all was Madame Geoffrin whom Stanislas II of Poland called "Mama", the friend of Joseph II and of Catherine the Great. In Madame Geoffrin's salon one could meet ambassadors like Kaunitz, Maria Theresa's future Chancellor, artists and writers and foreign enlightenment visitors: Hume, Wilkes, Beccaria, Garrick.
The salon was the great institution of learning, one of the most effective bases from which enlightened ideas spread. Its power over society is like that of facebook and twitter being used to over through governments causing a surge of sweeping changes in the lives of people across the world.
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Top-level comments on this article: (5 total)
Hi Chris. Thank you for sharing this interesting bit of information. Social networking has come a long way! Blessings, Teresa
Interesting comparison Chris. Interesting article. Thank you.
I would not go as far as to say that Twitter is the modern equivalent of the salon though.
I feel facebook and twitter have their place in the world but, we must be careful not to allow things and ideas to undermind our values. I feel children many times no longer listen to or even go to their elders for advice much less answers. It is hard to see children who are not influenced by loving parents and adults struggle through life.
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