A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Interpreting Television

 

You wouldn't know it from watching reaction videos to Joss Whedon's television show Buffy the Vampire on YouTube, but there are several ways one can analyse a sophisticated (multi-tonal, multi-generic, novelistic, reflexive) television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One, for instance, can analyse Buffy on the literal or surface level by focusing on the story or stories the show tells. One can, in other words, explore the plot, narrative, and characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer though novelistic plotting and narrative are not fully grasped by most reactors who don't understand that early chapters or episodes of the novel provide the template and foundation for what comes after. One can analyse Buffy normatively or emotionally, though hopefully only after gaining a familiarity with the story or stories Buffy tells. This is, generally speaking, the me likee or me don't likee level of "analysis". One can analyse the metaphorical or allegorical level of Buffy. One of the key metaphors in the high school years of Buffy is the high school as hell metaphor and the vampires, demons, and monsters that represent or reflect that key metaphor in seasons one through three of the show, though the metaphors don't end there. One can analyse the mythological or world building aspects of Buffy and the logic of that created world. Vampires in Buffy, for instance, go "poof" when they are slain and hardly anyone knows that Buffy is the slayer, the fighter of killers, demons, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night, a "reality", noted in the second part of the very first episode of the series. One can analyse Buffy on the social ethical level. Buffy reflects Joss Whedon's social ethical existentialism, an existentialism where good and evil are more grey than black and white and in which the "good" fight is often less than epic and never ends. One can analyse the mise-en-scene of Buffy, the everything that is within the fame of Buffy and how it is edited together. One of the art class instruments to the left of the fame is, for instance, askew in the Buffy episode "The Body" as Buffy tells Dawn, in the frame within the frame (something that makes Dawn's art class as it looks through the window frame at Dawn and Buffy outside the classroom and us viewers as we look through the frame within the frame voyeurs of something inherently intimate), that their mother has died suddenly, an askewness that reflects the askewness Joyce's death brings with it not only for Buffy and Dawn but for a the entire Scooby gang whose surrogate "mother" Joyce was. The degree of sophistication of literal, normative, metaphorical/allegorical, mythological, mise-en-scene, and social ethical analysis, of course, can vary greatly since they are all intimately tied to the degree of cultural capital.

Not all of these levels of analysis, hence, are tabula rasa or self-evident. One learns the various ways to analyse a television show, a film, or a book through education, study, and schooling and the cultural capital one accrues through one's life course. If the evidence of social media is prologue most of those who react to Buffy start and stop at the simplest levels of analysis, the literal and the normative. EvilQK, one of the Buffy reactors chosen at random for observation, for instance, summarises or tries to summarise the story of the previous episode of Buffy she watched at the beginning of each subsequent reaction video after her reaction to the first episode of Buffy "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest". Her reactions are salt and peppered with comments about liking certain characters, liking mean girls, not liking certain clothes the characters wear (sans any reflection on what the clothes characters wear reflect about them), prognostication, and comments saying that would never happen, a curious response to a television show about vampires who aren't, of course, real. But then those who engage in literalist and normative "criticism" are often embedded in a simplistic and unreflective ideology of realism, a notion that television, film, and television must, on some level, be real and realistic. Buffy, by the way, is very "realistic" on the emotional level exploring as it does the pain of life. 

In the end, most reaction videos on YouTube are not that different from what one would expect of a junior or senior high school student. They summarise and likee or not likee. That many YouTube reactors, many of whom presumably have attended college and university college and university degrees, rarely move beyond the literal and normative levels points up how so many contemporary undergraduate colleges and universities have become more like high school since the 1970s since the rise of literalist, fundamentalist, and consumerist oriented bah humbug neo-liberalism which is slowly but surely killing liberal education.