A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Social Media in an Age of Narcissism and Anti-Intellectualism

In Alfred Hitchcock's superb film Rear Window a broken legged Jimmy Stewart who is stuck in a cast because of an accident he suffered while photographing a car race, sits in his wheelchair and stares at the windows (metaphorical cinema screens) across his quardrangle. As he, Scotty, gazes again and again at the windows across his courtyard he begins to do what we humans often do. He begins to construct stories--whether they are real or unreal we are unsure at first and even to some extent at the end of the movie--about the people and the situations they have gotten themselves into behind each of those rear windows. Today, the voyeuristic and narrative ("reality") constructing society Hitchcock explored in Rear Window dominates digital media sites like YouTube. On digital platforms like YouTube voyeurs voyeur and those being voyeured act out--whether in deep acting mode or surface acting mode is sometimes unclear--various scenes from their own movie about their own "real life" hoping, in the process, that by allowing voyeurs to voyeur them they can earn the crumbs (and to find perhaps simultaneously an online community of the like minded) offered by our new digital bosses (much the same as the old bosses) thanks to the "reactions" they put up for all the voyeuring "public" to see. 

Much of what these voyeur mes put up on their social media pages is almost as old as humankind itself. Sensationalists like Inside of You Clips and Sarah Z sensationalise for fun and (California dreaming) profits. Demagogues like Milo Yiannopoulos demagogue about the political, ideological, and cultural things that have proven to be successful in manipulating the gullible masses. Some of them are presumably even congnisant of the fact that they are playing a game. Those demagogued follow along after their cultural masters repeating the apologetic and polemical mantras their pied pipers have loudly whispered into their ears. Whingers and whiners, like Books and BlueStockings, spew emotional hatred and ad hominems at, for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon, with little of anything empirical, systematic, analytical, or substantive in their rants. In fact, posters like Books and BlueStockings foreground the empirical fact that many if not most of these voyeur mes have not grasped the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder. Even many of the posts that are actually grounded, if limitedly, in empirical facts end up being, as is the case, for example, with posts by Ronnie Bradley on Buffy, limitedly empirical, selectively empirical, and ultimately overdetermined by ideology and political correctness, making such posts more polemical than empirical and analytical. Decently done if limitedly exegetical reaction posts by those of SofieReacts, the LexiCrowd Thor, and Andy and Alex, though grounded in textual rather than political and ideological correct analysis, evince little understanding of the broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, geographic, and historical contexts of that to which they are reacting, approaches that make many YouTube reactions variants of fundamentalist textual literalism. In the end, so much of what is on social media sites like YouTube suggests very strongly that social media sites are the real vast wastelands of the core nation world, wastelands with only thin and microscopic intellectual oases (I am thinking here of the wonderful Fil from Wings of Pegasus, the amazing Clever Dick and his superb Doctor Who histories, Overthink Podcast, and others like them who do research and preparation for their videos) lying in the interstices of its vast intellectual deserts.