A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cult of YouTube

 

Humans, of course, depend on analogy and metaphor to understand and make sense of the world around them. They are analogical and metaphorical beings. I, for instance, briefly thought that a good analogy for YouTube might be the Anglican Church with its several sectarian groups and movements within it including, over its history, the intellectual and scholarly High Church, the liturgical and ritualistic Anglo-Catholic Church, its ecumenical Broad Church, and its anti-ritualistic and Protestant Low Church. 

Initially, there seemed to me to be some validity to the analogy between the Anglican Church and the Cult of YouTube. YouTube, after all, does have a very, very few scholars, some of them actual academics, some not, who post videos on the social media "platform". These posters actually know what they are talking about, something that makes them very different from the mass of YouTube video posters who, generally speaking, really don't know much about what they, in an act of anti-intellectual ignorance, arrogance, and pretentiousness, are talking about. YouTube even has a few ecumenists, those who do have and who actually display, in their videos some knowledge, if selective knowledge, of scholarship on say films or of television shows and who sometimes even do a bit of research on what they are watching. It is this limited knowledge and this limited use of scholarship and research, however, that is the problem with YouTube Broad Cultists. After all, those who have limited knowledge of that which they are exploring and examining have, in the final analysis, a limited knowledge of that which they are exploring and examining and this shows if perhaps only to those who are professional scholars rather than amateurs. Additionally, there are also problems with that other  major congregant group within the Cult of Google Broad Church, those supposed professionals grubbing for money within the precints of the digital Temple of Syrinx that is YouTube. What is the problem? The problem is, of course, that they are money grubbers and that colours what they react to and how they react to it. Needless to say these faithful give new meaning to commodity aestheticism amd commodification in general.

This is, however, where the analogy between Anglicanism and YouTube began to break down. The problem with the analogy between the Anglican Church and Cult of YouTube is that I really could not find analogues in YouTube to the Anglican Anglo-Catholic and Low Church sects within the Anglican communion. I suppose one could argue that since many videos on YouTube are similar making them almost ritualistic as a consequence, these bear a similarity to the liturgical and ritualistic aspects of Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism. The problem I have with that analogy, however, is that the ritualistic videos one finds on YouTube do not, generally speaking, rise to the high cultural level of Anglican Anglo-Catholicism. Instead, the repetitions in these videos are banal, bland, mundane, and knee jerky, as so much popular culture is, and as a consequence are lacking in the aesthetic qualities that make ritualistic Anglo-Catholicism (and old school Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian services) so pleasing and moving even for non-believers with at least a degree of cultural capital.

Additionally, there does not seem to be an analogue for Low Church Anglicanism in the Cult of YouTube. There is a lot of low culture, and I mean a lot of very low culture, on YouTube, more perhaps even than that on the vast wasteland that was and is American television. It, however, never rises to the level of even the lowest of Low Church Anglicanism in terms of its intellectual culture and cultural capital. Where Low Church Anglican Culture had a culture of intellectualism within its broader culture the lower than low cult discourse on YouTube with its stream of consciousness meets extremely low grade witticisms--"witticisms" which are more Gilligan's Island than Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw--meets studied ignorance is bliss, is anti-intellectual. This makes lower than low church YouTubism more akin to the anti-intellectualism that is so common in Western culture and particularly in its lowest common denominator popular media. It just spreads the bullshite around more which is why the brave new digital media of the brave new digital age are much more dangerous, potentially and actually, than the media that preceded it given the greater communication limitations of the preceding media. And this greater reach of the digital media is  one of the reasons why we have seen an increase in the impact of bullshit on the gullible masses and the increased prominence of paranoia, fantastical conspiracy theories, and ignorance among segments of the increasingly vocal hallucinating masses who seem to have no consciousness of the fact that they have been easlily manipulated by flim flam scoundrels, snake oil demagogues, and pied pipers of the like of Donald Trump and Ron Desantis and the gobshites on YouTube. All hail moronicity. All hail the Idiocracy.

None of this, by the way, makes the brave new digital age qualitatively different from previous communication ages whether oral, bookish, or mechanical. It simply means, as I noted, that the shite is spread more widely and broadly around. Welcome to the postmodernist brave new digital age where, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, those users are money so why should we give a shite about the disinformation and misinformation we peddle in order to make money? All Hail Mammon.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The New Labours of Herakles

I have long thought that some enterprising millennial/ GenX/GenY/GenZed/GenA, whatever, "Neo"-Klassikal scholar needs to update the twelve labours of Herakles or Hercules for the postmodernist GenMil digital age. I humbly submit that one of the "Neo" GenMil labours of Herakles, perhaps number one on the list--I know, after all that these GenMils do like their top ten or top one hundred whatever lists--should be research.

Now don't get me wrong, I know how difficult empirical and scientific research is in an age where the information of the world is at one's fingertips. After all, one has to actually type something, the labours of Herakles, for instance, into a search engine search box in order to find out something about it, something clearly much more difficult than having to get up off of a chair, keep walking to a library, or find transportation to an archive, things one had to do in those bad old so much easier days of cheesy yore. 

I suppose it is the immense difficulty of this task, of this "Neo" GenMil labour of Herakles that is research, that accounts for the fact that the vast majority of GenMil reactors to the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on that lower than lowest common denominator YouTube which likely accounts for why some 99% of reactors have an aversion to doing research on the show. Unfortunately, this act of slacker physics has consequences. Most reactors, for example, reactors who have little conception of how classical narrative works brought up on a steady diet of 24 to 32 page comic books and comic book movies with little plot and character development that they are, criticise season one of Buffy in that patented Monday morning quarterbacking fashion so beloved of the post-baby boom cohorts, without actually scientifically studying it and doing empirical research on it. The problem here, of course, is that if they actually did, god forbid, research on the show they would find, if they did their research properly and scientifically, a big if in the age of populist postmodernist fantasy, that the intention of those who created Buffy and ran the show during its first season was to construct a season one of the show that could be built off of in season two, should the show be renewed,  or to provide a satisfying end point for the sho if it wasn't renewed. But, of course, if these latter day Christopher Columbus's did this they might discover empirical data that might problematise their happily anti-empirical and anti-intellectual faux "opinions", "opinions" whose goal is not the empirical accuracy of the examined life but the Mammon grounded motive of profit, the god, jesus, and holy spirit all rolled into one, of the market is god and everything is a commodity life. These reactors are, you see, we want your money commodity aesthetic fetishists of the bliss inducing unexamined life.

The anti-intellectualism of the fetishised unexamined life is, of course, not new. Anti-intellectualism has been around for ages. Scholarly researchers have found it in Ancient Greece, in Ancient Rome, in the Dark Ages, in the Spain and North Africa of the Moors, in civil war England, and in British settler societies like the United States with its anti-Catholic, its anti-Mormon, its anti-Jehovah's Witnesses, its populists, and its anti-academic fundamentalist literalists, which is what most of the reactors on YouTube kind of are. After all in the same way that anti-academic fundamentalist literalists believe they don't need to do any research or any language studyin order to accurately understand the Tanakh or the Bible, GenMil reactor literalits believe they don't need to do any research in order to accurately understand Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And so it goes.
 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Drekkktor Googlestein

 

In the beginning before he made his monstrous word flesh Drekkkter Googlestein turned on his drawstring lamp so that he could clearly see what he would need in order to make his golem flesh. He took 50,000 parts standard operating capitalist huckster, 10,000 parts Sergeant Schultz, 10,000 parts standard operating televangelist shyster, 10,000 parts of the always wearing the happy face Pollyanna, 7000 parts of the suede denim secret police, and .00001 parts Einstein and he created he, him, his logos, his hybrid monster made flesh. This messiah, this saviour, this bringer of the Irradiant Future Drekkktor Googlestein called ByobTube then strode over the face of the dark abyss that was Google Earth, the twelve millionth iteration of Eden, the twelve millionth version of a human made utopia. And the good authoritarian and autocratic Drekkktor pronounced it good, at least for his pocketbook and his spin doctored for the gullible masses public image.

Google...uber alles!

America, America, Incompetence Has Shed It's Disgrace on Thee

 

For someone born in 1954 and who lived in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s it really is hard to see twenty-century America as anything but a pale reflection of what used to be. In the America of my youth, for example, there were good paying jobs with benefits often for life for working class and middle class Americans because stuff was actually manufactued in America. Populist spewing economic elite demagogues did not make the obscene amounts of monies and perks they do today and the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans and income equality while these were present were not as great as it has been since Ronnie Reagan. There were newspapers and television news outlets that reported facts and who actually did investigative journalism on important and significant things like Vietnam and Watergate rather than celebrities. Right wing populist wackos, White supremacists, and evangelical nutcases while around were not as prominent and as influential as they are today in the parts of the US that don't seem to have moved very far beyond the Stone Age. There were those who risked their careers to reveal to the American public the secrets of the ever growing national security and military-industrial state. There were exposes of American imperial covert actions in Congress, for instance. There were those who could and did see through the mythhistorical and demagogic bullshite of mythstorians, politicians, and capitalist shills, pointing up the fact that not everything was perfect in 1960s and 1970s America. I, for instance, grew up in segregated Dallas where even the free swimming hours in local park pools (mine was the Pecan Grove Park pool) were segregated by race and gender, though I wasn't aware of the former because there were not Blacks or Hispanics in the neighbourhood or in my school.

These days incompetency--economic incompetence, political incompetence, and cultural incompetence-- seems to be the dominant American way of the epoch. For instance, when a car passes in front of my flat my over the air television signal far too often disappears. Portable CD players turn themselves off when selected cars go by on the street in from of my house and they always stop toward the end of a CD. Digital TV feeds periodically disappear in time and space and satellite feeds disappear and sometimes other waves interfere with the TV giving this watcher that no-undestandable voice of god effect. DVD's--which were initially hawked by snake oil salesman as indestructible--and blu rays sometimes have missing menus, sometimes have missing content, sometimes freeze and fragment, break too easily when you are taking them out of the case, and sometimes come in packaging designed by engineers who seem to think that a book should be judged by its cover and come complete with packaging that damages what should be the central concern of these engineers, the DVD itself. Thankfully, blu rays are, for the most part, better able to withstand moronic packaging. Speaking of blu rays By the way, the Universal blu rays of the Dracula films looked good but the morons who designed the discs made it impossible to return to the film except by opening and closing my LG blu ray player and starting all over again. The Marengo DVD of Nothing Sacred and A Star is Born has the summary and time for Nothing Sacred under A Star is Born and the summary and time for A Star is Born under Nothing Sacred. My Warner Brothers DVD of Night at the Opera stopped between scenes 13-18 with several more scenes to go. This was just the latest of a number of WB DVD.  Needless to say, I boycott WB DVDs and blu rays. 

Television stations, like Comet (an enduring testament to the incompetence of populist gilded silver spoon in mouth Sinclair) and WYBN in the New York Catskills (another incompetently populist run "corporation"), generally run commercials over the films or shows half of the time on, for example, the Nostalgia network including at the end of movies meaning that the viewer misses the last two or three minutes of them making them even more difficult to make sense of than YouTube film or TV show reaction videos. The plods at WYBN, by the way, are so incompetent that they haven't even changed the channel names on the digital TV schedule such as Cozi and World that havent been on that station for years, they ran a commercial for Curtis Lumber that referred to a special that expired in September well into November, and currentely they are running a weather report on channel 14.6 that is off. Channel 25 WVBG which used to be run by the right wing incompetents who run WYBN is now run by equally incompetent right wing Christian fantasists, paranoics, and conspiracy theorists, and is, like their former parent, characterised by freezing and disapperaring channels. I should point out here that these right wing incompetents, who can't even run TV stations, want Americans to trust them to run governments. That many in the US think they can run them competently is a mark of how idiocratic the US has become.

Right wing TV stations and networks aren't the ones run incompetently in the US. The morons at Start TV, a partnership between CBS and Weigel, a network that rarely adds new shows to its endlessly repetitive lineup, started showing a new show, Nashville, at 10 pm but suddenly shifted it to 1 pm dead zone in the middle of the series. When the new series of the English remake of the Belgian programme Professor T premiered on PBS that network showed a promo for the Belgian original rather than the English remake. Thankfully, this, and something similar, only happened once The PBS Inspector Lewis series 5 blu-ray, which bizarrely is not numbered according to the original British series numbers, does not have any menus on either disc meaning that the episodes in this "series" cannot be accessed. PBS's "Democracy on Trial" on Frontline ended with a half hour to go to be replaced by Amanpour and Company thanks to a muckup by WMHT. Fox did a hack job on its conversion of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer to digital and 16:9, not surprising given the source. WZPJ TV, channel 4, Albany, had a channel 4.2 with no sound and a channel 4.4 with no picture, something that almost makes one believe in divine intervetion. Additionally, WZPJ's 4.1 and 4.2 periodically lose their signal input during the day.

American incompetence, which has been made worse by the new digital media, isn't simply a television, DVD, or blu way thing. Personal computers are sometimes defective when you turn them on. I once bought a Dell laptop which gave me an error message when I turned it on for the first time and which I exchanged for an Apple after several unsuccessful returns to Dell for fixes that never came. I have submitted three requests for the transfer of my medical records to my new GP--my old one retired-- to the corporation that handles records for the St Peter's Health care corporation here in Albany since June and my new GP has still not received them. Citibank could not send a confirmation message to my email, only to my which was impossible without hanging up on them. Thankfully, however, they could and did cancel my card without the need for a mobile phone confirmation. Vizio makes a soundbar that is difficult to put the power chord and the HDMI Arc cord into and, to top it off and to do something that has never been done before in the history of the universe, they have designed a remote for the soundbar that cannot be opened even after watching tutorials on YouTube of by going to the Vizio website. That Vizio has a website that tries to explain how to open the remote says it all and suggests that Vizio designers graduated with honours from Moron U.  Designers and engineers! Though Thorstein Veblen praised engineers as the real movers and shakers of civilisation today’s digital engineers and designers seem to be brainy morons who never use the moronic things they design.

Speaking of corporations, trying to navigate the maze of incompetent machines on corporate phone lines in order to speak to a real person is akin to having all of your teeth pulled at once followed by a chaser of a railway spike through the head. Using some online pay systems is like being forced to endure an unbearable fifteen minutes of bad, really bad, Vogon poetry. Beyond that there are the kafkaesque bureaucratic absurdities. I recently called TIAA-CREF to request that a form be sent to a personal address that they have had for at least ten years. They refused saying they are just doing their jobs. Private corporate absurdity run amok.

And then there is Amazon incompetence, which deserves a special book of its own. I have grown weary of dealing with banal politically, ideologically, and culturally correct corporate fascists like Google and Amazon. I have moved all my email from Gmail to Yahoo. I am now trying to delete my Amazon account. I thought I had accomplished this today by cancelling an item Amazon should have cancelled long ago since it has been sitting in my not yet shipped orders since April making it likely unavailable. Several hours later, however, I get an email telling me my account can't be exterminated because there is an open item in my account. And so the ever more moronic Kafkaesque circle turns in the brave new digital world. 

Incompetence is not only technological It is also part of American political and economic culture. Some of this incompetence is intentional. Republicrats, that populist faux conservative merger of Republicans, Birchers, and Dixiecrats, really don't want the federal political system to work or function.Much of it, however along with hypocrisy,and corruption are an integral part of American politics and corporations and no one seems to care beyond the knee jerk rhetoric that flows out of the gobs of many as mantras. Myth, for many, is preferable to facts and anti-intellectualism seems to be even more prominent than it was in the past in this nation with a long history of anti-intellectualism. Demagoguery and the manipulation of the masses is a profit making corporate enterprise stocked with political consultants and advertising consultants trained in the "fine" art of professional bullshitting, bullsthitters who have been able to convince the masses that rich fecks are the real victims of a tyrannical political system. Let's not forget that whinging is the real American national pasttime: Poor poor pitiful them. The American corporation Car  Shield cites a paraphrase of Thomas Paine in one of its morally challenged propaganda missives as a quote from the most radical of the American founding fathers. Political, economic, cultural, and ideological correctness of American left, liberal, conservative, and populist right is common in social media, the sports world, military advertising, and academia.

Goodbye competent America. We hardly knew ye. All hail the brave new digital crapolution!

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Because I Said It

 

Anti-intellectualism, some of which is hidden behind a facade of intellectualism, has had a long history in the United States as Know Nothingism, Nativism, and anti-academicism amply shows. Whether there is more anti-intellectualism in the US today than in the past is an open question. What is not open to question, however, is the fact that social media and its often anti-intellectual demagogic cheerleaders, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to name just a few, are spreading it more broadly and more rapidly. They clearly are, which is why they are anti-intellectual demagogues.

I have been observing reaction videos on the American television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on YouTube and critically participating in them for the last couple of years and there are several things that I have found fascinating about them. But first a little demography, Most of the YouTube reaction videos I have been observing over the last several years have been posted by those who I will refer to as gensolescents, those young people who demographers would place in the Generation Zed and Generation Alpha cohorts, those young people, in other words, who came of age in the years after Buffy ended its seven year television run between 1997 and 2003 on the two netlets of American over the air commercial or linear television the WB and UPN (now the CW) .

I want to focus on one aspect of the reaction videos I have been observing and which I have found intriguing in this essay, age. One of the issues that continually pops up on many if not most of the reaction videos of gensolescents to Buffy is age. Many reactors have found the relationship between the sixteen year old Buffy, the chosen and charismatic (in Weberian terms) vampire Slayer, and Angel, a vampire born in Ireland in 1727 who was turned into a vampire in 1753, ewwwwy. They continually fail to take into account in their reaction videos the difference between Angel's historical or chronological age, he is around two hundred and fifty years when Buffy the Vampire Slayer begins, and his age when he is sired by Darla, a vampire sired by the Master in 1609, in 1753. This makes Angel literally 26, because, as the vampire lore of Buffy has it, Angel no longer ages biologically after he is sired by Darla. What makes the emotion based and normatively grounded ewwwwyness of reactors so interesting to me is that while the reactors are being literal in one way--they see an Angel who is over 250 dating a sixteen year old high school student, ewww--they are ignoring another literal fact in the Buffyverse--the fact that Angel ceased aging biologically after he was sired by Darla. To top it off, many if not most of the reactors aren't even aware of the contradiction making them akin to Christian fundamentalists who smooth over the contradictions and inconsistencies in their holy writ thanks to an amnesiac anti-intellectualism.

Another contentious age based normative ewwwwyness for many Buffy reactors on YouTube is the relationship between sometime Scooby or slayerette--this is what Buffy's sidekicks in the war against the vampires, the demons, and the witches call themselves--Cordelia Chase and the Watcher who replaces Buffy's Watcher and mentor Giles, Wesley Wyndham-Price in the third season of the show. Many if not most of the reactors find the relationship between the twenty something Wesley and the 18 year old Cordelia ewwwwy despite the fact that 18 is the age of consent in California, something almost none of the reactors have done any research on given the fact that many if not most of them have a pathological fear of doing research and prefer to watch Buffy tabula rasa, in an anti-intellectual way, in other words. Many of them even make the factual mistake of categorising Wesley as a teacher, which he is emphatically and factually not, increasing the emotional ewwwwyness factor in the process, another example of reactor anti-intellectualism and anti-empiricism. 

While anti-intellectualism has been around since time immemorial and in the United States even before there was a United States of America, postmodern American anti-intellectualism seems to have some unique aspects to it. One of these unique wrinkles seems to be tied to a social and cultural movement in American schools, a movement that prioritises self-esteem and respect for student opinions regardless of whether those opinions are grounded in empirical and factual accuracy or not, over facticity. And one can find this it is my opinion and it does not matter whether I can back it up with evidence or empirical criteria or not because it is my opinion and must be respected repeatedly in Buffy reactions on YouTube and in the comments sections of these reaction videos by those like killianlpc, a wonderfully appropriate YouTube handle for someone who prefers political correctness or pc to empirical accuracy and methodological competency, for someone who, in other words, prefers the anti-intellectualism of unverified opinion to theoretical, methodological, and empirical competency. 

Killianlpc, you see, is one of those YouTube posters who throws around godlike omniscient declarative sentences as if they were candy corn and it was Halloween. This episode, he/she routinely declared in his/her posts, was great, that was good, and the other was OK. However, when asked what criteria s/he based such claims on the best killianlpc could do was nada. He/she, in other words, could not name a single criterion on which he grounded these claims other than that it was his/her opinion and it had to be accepted and respected because he/she expressed an opinion. The fetishisations of the unexamined life. Like many other gensolescents who post on on YouTube, you see, killianlpc evinced little comprehension of the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder. 

While anti-intellectualism is rampant on YouTube anti-intellectual politically and ideologically correct censorship proved, at least on the basis of my admittedly selective observations, to be limited. During my participant observations I found only two proto-fascist or fascist reactors who either threatened or did make use of YouTube's ambiguous (the "may violate community standards" discourse), selective, and arbitrary censorship apparatus, Java and Java, an anti-intellectual who failed to comprehend that intellectual critique was not hate speech and who had a pollyannaish view of what posts should be like, who threatened to make use of YouTube's censorship power, and Brooke Whipple, an anti-intellectual who, like killianlpc, was pathologically unable to distinguish between intellectual critique and opinion and who fetishised opinions in a politically and ideologically correct fashion, who did avail herself of YouTube's censorship apparatus. Apart from Java and Java and Whipple most reactors and posters had an agree to disagree, if sometimes intensely and if sometimes adolescently (see Tyler Alexander, for example), live and let live attitude, something that distinguishes most reactors and posters from politically and ideologically correct proto-fascists or fascists like Java and Java and Whipple.  

And so the anti-intellectualism goes. Where is Karen when you need her?

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Google the Pimp

 

There is no doubt about it any longer. The slaggy Google is the biggest pimp and the biggest hypocrite on the planet. It is even a bigger pimp and hypocrite than its close cousin, the skanky Facebook, which is stuck in a kind of eternal Zeno's paradox as it tries to catch up with Google in the hypocritical sweepstakes.

Like all social media Google and its flunky YouTube, have a set "community standards", one of which is not free speech. However, in true hypocritical and capitalist vampire fashion, Google and YouTube ban some for supposedly--they refer to it as "may"-- violate community standards. At the same time, however, this Pimpy Hypocrite simultaneously keeps videos up that "may", nay certainly, violate the selectively applied community standards they proclaim. What is behind this selectivity? It should be obvious. The videos Google and YouTube keep up despite their misogyny, their mythfications, their crude language, and their falsity because they make monies for this corporate cartel and worshipper of Mammon (Halleludollar). Now that is what I call situational ethics and situational bullshiting. And this, of course, makes Google, despite its self-serving rhetoric, a typical capitalist corporation, a flim flammer.

I have finally grown weary of this pimping hypocritical corporation filled to the gills with hubris and selective self-righteousness. As a consequence I have decided to dump Gmail into the rubbish bin of fascist history where this digital Elmer Gantry belongs. Pity that it won't stay where it belongs. 

Newton Minow once referred to American television as a vast wasteland. Compared to American television, however, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and social media in general are the real lower than low common denominator vast wasteland. Welcome to the brave new digital world of anti-intellectualism. I wonder if Minow is spinning in his grave?

The TracFone Kiada, The Sequel

Today is very likely the day that I will ever purchase TracFone service again. Half of the time that I have had TracFone service the service has been at best mediocre and often dismal. Back in 2021, for instance, my online account page was malfunctioning. The only way I could get it fixed was to file a complaint with the office of the Attorney General of New York and after about a month the malfunction was fixed by someone at TracFone after a series of emails between the two of us.

Well today, in 2023, the problems with the online account page are back for a return engagement again. According to my account page my unlimited plan with unlimited talk and unlimited text was set to expire in March of 2024. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I tried to make a call and I got Straight Talk. When I called Straight Talk I was told the online accounts page was wrong and that one of my plans, the unlimited one, had expired and my limited plan would expire in 2024. Why they didn't roll these two into one another is a mystery. well perhaps not a mystery since it increases TracFone profits.

 
So I, stupidly, bought another Tracfone unlimited plan. And, of course, my online accounts page is a disaster again. The wrong email is attached to the account--I am eliminating all Google service--the corporation that is evil--and going with alternatives. And I can no longer get into my accounts page to do anything anymore save spend my time doing the circle game, namely, putting my account information into the accounts page at least three times before I can get to my service information, which now, I am told, expires in 2025 though I have my doubts about the veracity of this information given past experience.

So, as I said, I am likely going to explore alternative phone service when this TracFone plan expires. I will also be contacting the New York AG yet again about the incompetency of this corporation. The TracFone accounts online page has to be in the Crappy Accounts Pages Top Ten list, though that of Empire Blue gives TracFone a run for its money. Sadly, the fact that TracFone has been scarfed up by cartel Verizon hasn't helped it move off that list. Apparently as long as TracFone is around the AG of NYS will not be lonely.
 

The Books of My Life: The Culture of Western Europe

 

Over the course of my intellectual life I have had a number of mentors including Max Weber, Karl Mark, Karl Mannheim, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner, to name just a few. Most of these mentors mentored me not in the classroom but rather through the books and journal articles they wrote and which I read. The books and journal articles I read  made me think critically about evidence, methodology, and theory, all things essential to reflect upon if one hopes to understand the human comedy, the human farce, the human drama, and the human tragedy in all its forms, something I have been trying to do for at least forty years.

Another thing my mentors taught me since they taught in a variety of academic disciplines was the importance of interdisciplinarity, something far too often lost in the specialised study of trees that has been central to academic intellectual life since the twentieth-century. I came to realise that the boundaries marking off disciplinary borders in academe and particularly in the academic social sciences, disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology, were and are artificial, arbitrary, and socially constructed fetishes or reifications. Over time I came to see that the artificial intellectual borders that marked off one academic discipline from another inhibited rather than helped one understand, in an integrated way, that all human beings are economic, political, cultural, geographic, and biological-demographic animals and that by looking at humans through these ideal types we could understand human life in all of its better angel and less better angel forms. The wholistic approach to the study of humanity was something that appealed greatly to me since I quickly came to identity myself primarily as a cultural anthropologist, as someone, in other words, who saw himself as part of a discipline which, at least in North America, was grounded in the assumption that to understand humanity one needed to study human biology, human language, human society, human culture, and human prehistory. Lastly, my mentors taught me that the study of humankind must be comparative if one was to truly and fully understand humankind.

Initially, I was only limitedly interested in history, a discipline that studied humans across time. I, was of course, forced to take history classes in high school. I was, however, only limitedly stimulated by them.  When I got to college I tended to focus my attention instead on the social sciences, disciplines which were not taught in the high school I attended. Now don't get me wrong, I was interested in history but history as a methodology rather than as an academic course of reading or study. So while I was not particularly interested in history as an academic discipline I did understand that the study of human beings must not only be reflexive, comparative, and social scientific but it must also be historical. Given this I, over time, became more and more interested in history as a discipline in addition to history as a method though I would still maintain that history is more of a methodology than an academic discipline. 

Despite my limited interest in the discipline of history in my early academic years there were a few historians who had an immense impact on my subsequent intellectual development. I can still recall some forty years later, for instance, reading Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic in Robert Janelli's class on folklore and religion at Indiana University. Its integration of theory, method, and anthropologically sensitive history had an immense impact on how I approached both theoretically and methodologically the study of humankind. Another historian who also had an immense impact on my intellectual development was George Mosse. I read Mosse's book Toward the Final Solution for a class on the Holocaust that I took with Todd Edelman who, at the time, taught at Indiana. I was gobsmacked by Mosse's exploration of the cultures that led to the Shoah in the 1930s and 1940s in Western Europe.  Both Thomas and Mosse made me see that for cultural anthropology, sociology, and social psychology to have any validity at all they all, in addition, had to be historical, must explore humankind in time as well as space, in some way, shape, or form. It was for that reason that I eventually matriculated in a history faculty in my postgraduate years, though I continued to find the discipline of history too theoretically and methodologically anemic and hence too parochial.

Though I am now retired I continue to read extensively in the social sciences and in history. Recently I read Mosse's (University of Wisconsin, Hebrew University) brilliant The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chicago: Rand McNally, second edition,  1974). As in Toward the Final Solution Mosse superbly traces, if in greater detail, the cultures and ideologies that impacted Western Europe (and the Western settler societies beyond Europe including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States) that dominated those two centuries in the The Culture of Western Europe. In the book Mosse explores what he argues is central to the cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western Europe, namely, the separation of culture. the "real", from civilisation, the "artificial". 

Mosse's book takes readers on an excursion through the several -isms that dominated the epoch: romanticism, nationalism, racism, liberalism, conservatism, idealism, socialism, marxism, scientism or positivism, and fascism. These ideal type -isms, as they interacted with the historical dynamics of the era, argues Mosse, particularly modernity with its scientism, industrialisation, bureaucratisation, and mass society, have taken various hybridic forms, Despite taking various forms over these years, contends Mosse, all of these cultures or ideologies tended to emphasise, as Mosse makes clear, culture over civilisation. This distinction, argues Mosse, eventually led to the genocidal mania of the 1930s and 1940s, a genocide in which romanticism, with its notion of the organic real, culture, became affixed to mass racial nationalism (the culture collective blood and collective soil), mass culture, mass industrialisation, and mass modern technology. Together these led to genocide on a modern mass scale, the Holocaust.

The ideal type cultures or ideologies Mosse delineates, of course, as anyone who has been paying attention to increasing autocracy in Eastern Europe and the United States, are still with us today in the core nation West, a fact that adds an eerie been there done that quality to the historical tale Mosse tells. Though many after World War Ii, a war many thought of as a war against tyrannical fascism, argued that romantic, nationalist, and racist fascism had been tossed onto the rubbish bin of history once and for all, Mosse rightly notes in the conclusion to The Culture of Western Europe, that  the culture and ideology of fascism will never fade away. In the United States, for instance, romanticism has been integrated with nationalism and industrial capitalism to give us the most recent version of intolerant, nativist, and theocratic (my way of the highway) right wing Christian fascism. As Mosse notes, this combination of romanticism, nationalism, racism, and intolerance is a very effective meaning system, an effective meaning system that provides, particularly in times of economic, political, and cultural stress, simplistic answers to complex realities, all wrapped up in a simple minded manichean tale of us good and them evil, a manichean tale in which the "true Americans" must save America from devious liberal/Marxist/socialist/fascist enemies who are sapping America's very essence or soul.

Mosse's books, including The Culture of Western Europe, remain, in my opinion, among the most important and revelatory books published in the post-World War II era. It was a wonderful experience revisiting the work of someone I regard as one of the twentieth century's greatest historians some forty years or so after I read Toward the Final Solution in a class on the Holocaust. The Culture of Western Europe should, in my opinion, be read by anyone interested in history, particularly Western history, Western cultural history, and cultural studies. Very strongly recommended. 

There is, by the way, a third edition of The Culture of Western Europe which was published in 1988. I have not seen the third edition of the book though I am interested in taking a look at the recent University of Wisconsin Press reprint of the book, an edition which apparently restores the maps and illustrated material from the first edition of the book that had been taken out in the second. I am interested in taking a look at the new edition of the book because I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be yet another example of the dumbing down of university textbooks in the wake of the demographic revolution in American universities after the 1960s, the decline in student cultural capital, a decline so immense that one can no longer assume that all students have a basic understanding of history of Europe since the Enlightenment let alone of the Christian Bible, a book that has had an immense impact on the culture of Western society, and the ever increasing corporate businessification of universities throughout the West. If I recall correctly, I first noticed this dumbing down of university textbooks while I was preparing to teach a course on American religion. I intended to use Catherine Albanese's excellent America: Religions and Religion for the course, a book I had read in its 1998 edition. But when I compared the 1998 edition with the 2006 edition I was horrified to discover that over two hundred pages of Albanese's book had simply vanished from the book between the third and fourth editions. This cleansing of pages from the book, a cleansing I increasingly suspected was a response to the decline in student cultural capital and the retail model of education that dominates the culture of American administrators who run American research universities these days. After all American universities have become more and more like a glorified high school since the 1970s, an era that has not only seen the adoption of a retail model by the increasingly corporate capitalist administrators who dream of moving up the corporate status ladder by making their administrative mark on American colleges and universities, and an era which has been characterised by the difficulties in getting students to read even a short book of approximately 100 to 200 pages.