A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Radiant Future is Now

 

One would think that after the twentieth century, an era characterised by technological utopianism along with the many negative impacts of this technological change, that many more post-baby boomers would be skeptical of the notion that now, today, is the best of all possible technological worlds. Even a quick peek at reaction videos on social media and particularly YouTube, however, quickly disabuses one of the hypotheses that technological utopianism has declined in the wake of a century of genocide, mass murder, and environmental devastation, much of it, of course, the product of the very technological changes many regard as utopian. After all, while the twentieth century gave us the washing machine, the motor car, aeroplanes, and cotton candy, which was developed in the late nineteenth century, it also gave us the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the mass murders at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, toxic chemicals in the environment and in our homes, and climate change. One would think that by no2 many, as many counterculturalists recognised in the nineteen-sixties, would realise the fact that technology, like virtually everything, is a double edged sword.

Recently, while doing ethnography on YouTube, I ran across a reaction video on the first episode of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) by one EvilQK. I found a number of things interesting about this "reaction" video beyond the fact that EvilQK did not do much research about the television show (something that seemingly 99% of YouTube reactors do not do) and as a consequence had little sense of the economic realities Buffy had to operate within in season one or the intentions of those who created and made Buffy. Like so many of her generation it became quickly apparent that EvilQK is embedded within a ideology in which current technologies are thought to be inherently better than those of the past and this led her to take a highly critical stance on the special effects of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. According to Evil, if only Buffy had been made today it would have been so much better.

But does the supposed technology primitivism of Buffy and a host of other television and films of the past damn these shows to a special level of critical hell? Many post-baby boomers, of course, enamoured of special effects as they are today, miss several facts. First, given that technological change in film and television is a constant, and perhaps even more constant in the brave new digital era, they don't seem to grasp the simple historical fact that the technologies of today will seem primitive from the vantage point of the future given that technological change is a constant. Many post-baby boomers, in other words, lack a historical sense and consciousness when it comes to television and film and beyond.

Second, and this is something that post-baby boomers don't seem to grasp either, on an aesthetic or artistic level technological change is not always, if we want to engage in a descriptive meets normative analysis, for the better. Black and white, something that seems to be seen by many of todays post-baby boomers as evil incarnate for a variety of reasons--it is coded as old and hence inferior by many and it is seen as less "realistic" than colour television and film--is actually artistically much more interesting than generally bland colour television shows and films. The reason for this is simple, it is difficult if not impossible for colour television shows or films to manipulate light and dark, shadows, fog, or smoke rings, in the way that black and white can and has in the classic past. This is not to say that some colour television or film do not strive for and even achieve visual art. The colour television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, uses filters, including red filters for obvious reasons, and the contrast between light and dark in very interesting ways. In many ways, in fact, Buffy is so dark that it seems like a colour television striving for black and white and the aesthetics of black and white. Additionally, the gorgeous colour film Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) uses colour in an artistically breathtaking way as anyone who has seen that cult film hopefully recognises. Killer Klowns is, however, the exception that proves the rule that colour is, generally speaking, less interesting and less artistically successful than black and white films in general. Classics are classics for a reason.

This notion that technology today is better than the technology of the past is, of course, grounded in a number of cultural ideologies. It is, as I noted, grounded in the utopian notion that the past is prologue to the present and the present is better than the past, an ideology that goes back at least to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. This notion is also grounded in the ideology that realism is always better, an ideological notion also tied to ahistorical notions that the present is more realistic than the past because of superior technologies that, it is believed, make television shows and films progressively more realistic. Technological teleologism. This notion that television shows and films of the present are more real than the past, of course, in order to be believed, must elide the fact that many considered nineteenth century photography and films, particularly talking films in black and white, more realistic than the painting and theatre that came before it. It is a notion that is also grounded in an absurd contradiction because television and shows before digital technologies were actually more realistic since they actually blew up real cars rather than computer simulations and filmed rain that looked more like rain than digital technologies. And this is a notion that, as very few reactors grasp, is grounded in a delusion for neither television or film, including documentaries, are realistic given that they manipulate story, narrative, plot, tone, music, and mise-en-scene for dramatic, tragic, comic, for entertainment and financial, and, if in much less numbers, for artistic purposes. Neither television or film is thus real. Real would be following me around 24-7 as I go to the restroom, cook, clean, or watch television and films, all things that would bore most viewers probably to death. Interestingly, if social media polemicists and apologists for realism really wanted realism in their films they would watch the films of European directors like Ingmar Bergman or Eric Rohmer (though admittedly America had its cinematic and television realism--real locations--in Naked City (film, 1948, television, 1958-1963) and Route 66 (1960-1964). They won't do this because, of course, because they have an emotion based irrational fear and hatred of subtitles. Welcome to the world of the analytically challenged.

In the end, it is, speaking of tone, a tragedy and a comedy perhaps even a farce that so many post-baby boomers who have been socialised into the Hollywood special effects dominated television and film unthinkingly (embodying) think that that form of television and film is the only television show or film worth watching. It is a tragedy because it means that so many don't understand that classic films and television shows are founded on story, plot, narrative, and character development, something lacking in any deep way in so much of the, at best, mediocre film and television product that comes out of Hollywood and its many close cousins these days. It is a farce because this situation where culture and ideology creates reality keeps happening again and again in human communities despite the availability of evidence, at least to those empirically inclined, that shows that the present is not really better than the past. It may be different but in the end humans, who have produced these new technologies, are, like the technologies they produce, a double edged sword. They too are flawed.