ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we survey Western political philosophy about how the body politic has been analogized as a biological organism comprising government authorities, social organizations, churches, and other institutions, and how through its appendages, the public ideally exercises a form of self-government. However, we begin to consider how the body politic is shaped in today's digitally platformed society, in which political discourse takes place on social media in the form of memes, or short, decontextualized, highly emotional social media posts. What we begin to see is how these hot takes on social media are frequently forged within a stream of misinformation and cultural politics that permeate through formal social and governmental institutions. Unlike the traditional, or ideal, body politic that is rooted in reasoning and common knowledge, the often-uninformed discourse taking place on social media creates what, at best, might be considered as a mob democracy. We will begin our argument that the use of emotional appeals in social media posts about social/political topics degrades the quality of civic discourse and encourages the abandonment of reasoning in democratic self-governance.
