A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: What YouTube Tells Us About the Cheesy State of Intellectual Life in the English Speaking World

I am increasingly convinced that nothing tells us more about the desultory nature of intellectual life in the English speaking world than YouTube reaction videos. Recently I ran across YouTube reaction videos on the first episode of the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest" by Java and Jave and to the tenth episode of season three of Buffy, "Amends" by Haarute. Nothing, I think, better encapsulates the dismal state of scientific literacy and practise than both of these YouTube reaction videos. Reaction is, by the way, a rather appropriate term for these at best mediocrities since there is really not much thought behind them as a general rule.

One of the things that both Java and Java and Haarute harped on was an ill defined term that seems to have become the knee jerk mantra of post-baby boom cohorts, "cheese". In"The Harvest", the second part of the first episode of Buffy, Java femme made the claim that some of the acting in that episode was "cheesy". Haarute, on the other hand, seemed--I say seem because like so many kids stuck in adolescent development he wasn't precise in his terminology--to use "cheesy" as a synonym for Dickensian sentimentality and melodrama. As I wasn't clear on how these kids were using "cheese"--they clearly weren't using it in scholarly or systematic and analytical fashion and they clearly were not using it as a synonym for trite or hacknayed--all I got from Java femme was that the "cheese" was in the extras, the acting extras. All I got from Haarute was a substanceless deflection and--though largely unsuccessful--an attempt at wit. When I pushed both for a more precise, systematic, and scientific definition of the term the best our reactors could offer was, in the case of Java femme, substanceless repetition, something, I suppose, appropriate to a medium that is in itself repetitive in its genres and tones. It, "cheese", she repeated, is in the fried cheese extras, and silence. Haarute, on the other hand, offered nothing of substantive value, something common among those engaged in YouTube reaction videos for fun and--limited--profit.

Interestingly, another poster on the Java and Java "The Harvest" thread was more up for the reasonable challenge of defining "cheese" and "cheesy" than was our Java female. He actually did try to offer a more precise definition of the term, one interestingly blissfully ignored in subsequent replies by Java femme. According to the poster M.S. "cheese" was a synonym for "inauthentic" acting by extras.

There are so many problems, as I pointed out to Java femme, M.S, and Haarute to no avail--Java femme soon knee jerked into that curious mixture of anti-intellectualism, arrogance, ignorance, self-righteousness, dogmatism, and cry baby cry snowflake mode so characteristic of amateurs--with both of these "definitions" that it is difficult to know where to begin our critique of the use of the term. Let's begin with the term itself. If "cheese" is inauthentic than the use of the term "cheese" by these kids is clearly inappropriate. Cheese is real. Velveeta, processed cheese, somewhat inauthentic cheese, would probably be a better term for supposed television acting inauthenticity. But let's not forget that many post baby boom fanboys and fangirls have never been particularly known for either their aesthetic use of the English language or for their scientific precision.

Another problem with the use of the term "cheese" is that the use of it by these two reactors is ahistorical. The conception of cheese as a synonym for inauthentic is grounded in a realistic conception of television (and by extension, theatre, film, literature, and popular culture). The problem here, of course, is that television (and by extension theatre, film, literature, and popular culture) are not real. They are economic products that use editing, tone, genre, mise-en-scene, music, and visuals to manipulate reality by turning a representation of reality, at best, into a story, into a narrative with a plot and even, if too rarely, character development, all in the hope of getting people to watch so that those who make film and television ca, in the process, make lots of monies. Television (and theatre, film, literature, and popcult) is, in other words, inherently inauthentic. Even documentaries are not realistic for the reason that they too manipulate "reality" through editing, tone, genre, mise-en-scene, music, and visuals. When this fact was pointed out to both Java femme and M.S. the only response I got something that did not surprise me, dead silence, something one would expect from those ill educated in science and the call and response nature of intellectual culture.

A further problem with the use of the word "cheese" to describe a supposed inauthentic style of acting is that this use of the term is ahistorical. Those who throw it around like tossed salad don't seem to grasp the historical fact that acting has never been singular. There have long been various approaches to acting across time, across space, and within time and space. While both the method and Brechtian approaches to acting, for instance, are equally grounded in notions of realism, the notions of realism and the acting practises they give rise to are different and inconsistent with each other. There has thus never been a singular notion of what "realist" acting is. Finally, notions of what constitute realistic acting has never been consistent across time within space. One suspects that the psychological realism of the method actor Marlon Brando would not be considered realistic by our fangirl Java femme or our fan boy M.S., today. The realism of past generations, in other words, is not necessarily the realism of the historically illiterate generation of post-baby boomers today. Unfortunately, given their ethnocentrism, their fetishisisations, and their ahistoricism, I suspect both Java femme and M.S. would argue that acting is more realistic today than in the past. Perhaps they will live long enough to hear the realism they argue for referred to as cheesy by future generations of historically anemic young people.

Another problem with YouTube reactors and the videos they grind out for money is the general lack of knowledge each of these reactors have about the very show, its tone, and its genres and the history of the medium and research on it they are engaging. Java femme seems blissfully unaware of the history of satire, black comedy, and parody and the acting strategies associated with each, which are themselves multiple. Haarute seems blissfully unaware of the long history of melodrama and he seems blissfully unaware that, if we link melodrama to inauthenticity in order to try to square the "cheesy" circle, that humans have historically loved sentimentality and melodrama in the stories they tell amongst themselves and in the stories, the fairy tales, that are told to them. The fairy tale film Pretty Woman (1990), for instance, a reworking of Cinderella, was  despite its inauthenticity, quite popular at the domestic box office as were and are many of the hyper-unrealistic superhero films that come out of Hollywood in droves.

Then there is the problem of the term itself. Is "cheese" a synonym for parody, satire, black comedy, melodrama and the acting styles associated with each?  If so, why use an imprecise term like "cheese" when more precise terms that have been used for years are available to describe these varying general acting styles? Additionally, we should not forget that Buffy itself is multi-tonal and hence parodic, satiric, and dark comedic styles and forms of acting may be intentional on the part of those who made the television show.

Finally, there are the acting issues themselves. What does it mean that extras are "cheesy"? They are extras, after all, and do not have speaking parts. Is it in their smiles, their frowns, their quizzical looks? In the way they walk? in their gazes? in the way they move their eyes? Is it in the way they move their heads? in the way they dress? in the way they walk into a classroom? If the answer is yes to any of these or similar others it is incumbent on the person making the claim to detail precisely how the extras are acting "cheesily". Needless to say, neither Java femme or M.S. do this pointing up just how lacking in scientific precision and analytical skills their "approach" is.

All in all, the imprecise, ahistorical, and lazy use of the term cheese by the younger generations is sadly reflective of something going on in the broader core nation English speaking world, namely, a lack of education and schooling in critical approaches to television and beyond, and in scientific approaches to texts. Science, after all, strives for precision rather than imprecision. In the end, perhaps, "cheese" and "cheesiness" is best understood as an inauthenticity of approach by some human beings, particular those human beings engaged in offering reaction videos on YouTube and other social media sites. And while this has long been a common problem it is now, in the brave new world of digital media, simply more noticeable because of the omnipresence of reaction videos like that of Java and Java and Haarute, reaction videos which point up the lack of historical and scientific literacy amongst even the semi-schooled in English language core societies.

 

The Books of My Life: One Nation, Two Cultures

 

Polemics and apologetics are, of course, two sides of the same demagogic coin. Demagoguery itself has a long history both inside of and outside of academia. The Athenian leader Perikles, for instance, warned of the potential influence of demagogues during Athens's war with Sparta. Many of the early Christian fathers proudly identified themselves as polemicists and apologists as they argued for the falsity of other faiths or meaning systems and proclaimed the truth of their own. Many true believer monotheists have engaged in polemics and apologetics ever since, though many have not acknowledged the fact that that is what they do. Polemics and apologetics have been central to American, Canadian, and Australian political culture almost since the "birth" of those British settler societies.

The academy, at least since the late 19th century, thanks to the impact of positivism on the hard and soft sciences in the ivory tower, have, at least in their official rhetoric, abjured polemics and apologetics in favour of empiricism, though some might argue and several have that empiricists have proclaimed their value freeness way too often for as Max Weber noted in the early twentieth century what academics choose to study reflects, on some level, the values of the researcher. 

Despite their proclamation of value neutrality academics have, on occasion self consciously and almost messianically waded into polemical and apologetic waters. Historian Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History (1998 and 2007) and historian Keith Windschuttle's Who Killed History (2000), for instance, are, respectively, apologias for "traditional" Canadian and "traditional" Australian history as they define it--an emphasis on "traditional" political history and the great men who helped make it--and polemics against Canadian and Australian social and cultural histories, which they see as arising out of the cultural ferment of the countercultural 1960s, an era they generally bemoan and see emblematic of the decline of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. An American variant of this argument can be found in historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (New York, Vintage, 1999, edition with a new afterword, 2001). 

While Himmelfarb trods terrain similar to that of Granatstein and Windschuttle, her polemic and apologetic is more broadly focused than either those two, who focus their gaze on education and more particularly on higher education. Himmelfarb, like Granatstein and Windschuttle, sees academia as impacted by post-1960s social and cultural historical fads. She traces these, as has become common among intellectual conservatives in Canada, Australia, and the United States to the situational pluralism, multiculturalism, and relativism of the sixties counterculture, which, she argues, has now become the dominant cultural strain in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America.

While Himmelfarb claims that the cultural ideologies of 1960s counterculturalists have become the dominant paradigm in the United States since the 1970s, a claim some might dispute given the fact that the US seems evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, exemplars of liberalism and conservatism (really "traditional" liberals) and right wingism respectively in fin-de-siecle and early twenty-first century America and little in the way of bipartisanship in the American federal legislature. Himmelfarb argues that there is also an oppositional culture of dissent from this pluralist, multicultural, and relativist hegemony, an oppositional culture that remains prominent and significant in the United States, the dissident culture of traditionalists, by which Himmelfarb seems to mean those who continue to promote the Victorian values of self-discipline, self-help, family, civil society, sexual morality, patriotism, and religion or morality. She counterpoints these values to the values of the counterculturalists which, she argues, have given rise in late twentieth and early twentieth century America to increased divorce rates, increased crime rates, increased drug abuse rates, increased female headed families living in poverty rates, increased cohabitation rates, increased narcissism, and increases in a host of other immoralities.

As I noted, Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics have become standard jeremiad fare among intellectual conservatives like Himmelfarb and fellow travellers like Lynne Cheney, William Bennett, and Robert Bork. This world of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century polemics and apologetics, however, seems rather quaint, dainty, and passe in the age of that right wing demagogue who has dominated so much discourse in the early 21st century, Donald Trump. Trump, of course, is someone who has been married multiple times, committed adultery on several occasions, brags of his sexual strategies and conquests to friends and media celebrities, makes fun of the disabled, proffers crazy and delusional conspiracy theories, rages at hallucinated un-American traitors in his midst, fellow travels with racists and Nazis, and who is the supreme example of a flim flam capitalist narcissist. Trump, who is hardly the paragon of Victorian ethical and moral and virtue Himmelfarb preaches, surprised many of the punditariat by winning the presidency of the United States in 2016 and who has become, since his run for the presidency in 2016, the totem figure of a purification cult grounded in a variant of the American nationalist faith, a cult centred on Trump and which has, as one of its major statements of faith, the belief that their great leader is a man called by god or nature to "make America great again". Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics, in other words, echo an intellectual world that has, at least for the moment, passed just like the age of Victoria has passed.

There are a number of other problems with Himmelfarb's declensional polemic and apologetic. On the theoretical level she argues for a cultural determinism or reductionism that is ultimately similar to and as problematic as the economic determinism of vulgar Marxists. And while culture, which Himmelfarb emphasises, is important, so are economics (class, poverty, we have to eat), politics (status, humans, who have always lived in groups, have to live together), geography, and demography (age, cohort). Additionally, Himmelfarb fails to distinguish descriptive or empirical relativism from normative or ethical and moral relativism, a common demonising strategy used by many conservative and right wing polemicists and apologists or demagogues.

On the methodological level Himmelfarb seems to argue, on the one hand, that the hegemonic postmodernist culture of situational tolerance and its heirs and the dissident culture of "traditionalists", with which she identifies, are Weberian ideal types and that they intersect and interact in a variety of ways in practise. At the same time, Himmelfarb seems to view these two cultures (a riff on C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities?) as distinct or binary movements engaged in a manichean culture war for the very soul of America. Additionally, Himmelfarb utilises and mixes and matches both quantitative and qualitative anecdotal data, which sometimes makes her argument less compelling and convincing.

On the cultural level Himmelfarb conflates intellectual and popular culture. While the United States does have intellectual cultures, which take a variety of forms in their culture, their politics, and their economics, the US also has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and anti-academicism particularly on the right, a movement distinct from traditional liberalism or conservatism. Additionally, Himmelfarb, who sees religion as a bulwark of Victorian values, misses the increasing age, cohort, and cultural tensions within American intellectual evangelicalism at places like Calvin and Wheaton (Illinois) these days.

Speaking of the religious culture, Himmelfarb finds greater cultural and ideological coherence in right wing religion than there is. She fails, for example, to distinguish between conservative intellectual Christianity, such as that found at Calvin College, Wheaton College (Illinois), Brigham Young University, and the University of Notre Dame, separatist Protestantism, such as that at Bob Jones University, and mainstream right wing anti-intellectual Christianity, which preaches the anti-intellectual gospel of everyman a Bible scholar regardless of whether they know Hebrew, Aramaic, koine Greek, and Near Eastern history or not, the gospel of free market capitalism, something non-existent in biblical times, the gospel of Anglo-Saxonism, and the gospel of theocratic we are OK you are not OK intolerance.

On the geographic level HImmelfarb's claim that the US is one nation and two cultures is problematic. Joel Garreau (The Nine Nations of North America, 1981), for instance, argues that there are nine nations with varying cultures in North America while Edward Crabb and James Curtis (Regions Apart, 2005) argue that the United States and Canada are really four nations or societies with different cultures: the francophone and the anglophone in Canada and the North and the South in the United States. I would argue that there are at least two nations in the United States, the Northeast and Pacific Coast and the South, and that one can find elements of each in other parts of the US. Austin, for instance, is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than rural Texas. Salt Lake City is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than most of the other parts of Mormon Utah and the Mormon culture region save perhaps for St. George. The South continues to be characterised by strong elements of theocratic Christianity and White identity superiority while the Intermountain West, save for Mormondom, continues to be characterised, in part, by European post-imperialist racism and rebellion against the federal government, which owns substantial amount of real estate in the West, despite the fact that without government intervention, interventions in the form of things like the Boulder Dam, the West would be a very different place.

Personally, I think one can make a compelling argument that there may be more than only two Americas. The American sports world, which can serve as an excellent transparent mirror into American culture and society, is tribal. It's the Dallas Cowboys and their worshipful fans versus the New York Giants and their devoted fans, the New York Yankees and their devoted fans versus the Boston Red Sox and their worshipful fans, the Chicago Bulls and their worshipful fans versus the Los Angeles Lakers and their devoted fans. The US, this sports tribalism suggests, is a land of tribes where national teams, like the US men's and women's soccer teams, are barely a blip on the national radar. It is, of course, different in other parts of the world. New Zealand, for instance, worships its national rugby team, which is central to Kiwi civic religion. Canada worships its national hockey team, a sport central to its public religion. Brasil worships its national football or soccer team, which is central to its civil religion. Generally speaking, one finds, in nations where a national sport is prominent and central, a greater sense of national identity, though there are interesting caveats here. In the US, for instance, the coding of the military and the police as sacred and the myths associated with them play an important role in the conceptualisation of national identity among right wing groups.

On the educational level Himmelfarb treats academia as too consensual. As several surveys have shown over the years there are a number of significant cultural and ideological differences between academics in the hard sciences, the social sciences, humanities, those who teach law, those who teach the medical sciences, and those who teach in other of the applied sciences. Social scientists and those in the humanities seem to best fit Himmerfarb's caricature and stereotype of the "typical" academic.

On the political level Himmelfarb makes the common mistake that the United States is a democracy. Even if one accepts the notion that the US is a republic the reality is that America is, like all core modern and postmodern societies, bureaucratic. As Weber and Michels noted in the early twentieth century, all modern and postmodern bureaucracies are pyramidal in form with structured and inherent inequalities of power, authority, and wealth embedded and institutionalised in them (See GE, Apple, Kroger's, the government of the American state of Indiana). And while one might argue that these structured inequalities are grounded in merit, one of the central myths of British settler societies, the realities of nepotism and structured inequalities related to social and cultural capital, suggest that merit is, at best, only partially at play in American economics, politics, and culture. So, if one is going to argue that the US is a democracy the person or persons making this argument need to provide empirical evidence as to why a society characterised by bureaucracies with embedded structural inequalities and impacted by favouritism are democratic. Personally, I don't think anyone can do this because the US is, by definition and as a consequence of its bureaucracies, an oligarchy and always has been.

Another political level problem one finds in One Nation, Two Cultures is Himmelfarb's failure to distinguish, as I noted earlier, intellectual conservatism from right wing political culture. These two cultures, and subcultural and countercultural variants within each, are different and distinct though there is overlap on some issues. Conservatives, historically speaking, have their origins in the intellectual opposition to the Enlightenment and particularly the French Revolution though one might argue that foreshadowings of it appear in the defenders of the monarchical faith. The right, on the other hand, has its origins in religion, anti-intellectualism, and a culture of white superiority. Both may preach the gospel of the free market but that doesn't mean that they have the same historical origins and that they are the same culturally and ideologically. As for Himmelfarb's conservatism, it is actually old Enlightenment liberalism, the liberalism of Adam Smith, the liberalism, if somewhat tensely, of John Stuart Mill, and the liberalism that was shocked by the French Revolution. 

On the social ethical level Himmelfarb is a bit confusing. Is Himmelfab arguing that counterculturalists have a situational morality, or does she maintain that the counterculturalists have no real ethics or morality at all? Can Himmelfarb admit that some elements of the "counterculture" have as ethically valid and thought out conception of the public sphere and of virtue, a virtue tied to human rights, as conservatives and right wingers? It seems to me that Himmelfarb wants to have it both ways, that she wants to have her cake--yes they do have an ethics and a morality--and not eat it too--no they don't have a social ethics and morality beyond a selective situational ethics and morality, which may be no ethics or morality at all.

Postscript: I am proud to say that this review was banned by Amazon for possibly violating "community standards" though how it violated I don't know because whoever categorised it as such--amateur suits, fundamentalist bots, politically correct ideologues--don't tell you how said review may, and they do use the word may, violates community standards. Whatever the reason it was banned and a censored version was requested, it is clear that autocratic and despotic Amazon is not committed to real freedom of speech and that says it all.