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.