A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Because I Said It

 

Anti-intellectualism, some of which is hidden behind a facade of intellectualism, has had a long history in the United States as Know Nothingism, Nativism, and anti-academicism amply shows. Whether there is more anti-intellectualism in the US today than in the past is an open question. What is not open to question, however, is the fact that social media and its often anti-intellectual demagogic cheerleaders, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to name just a few, are spreading it more broadly and more rapidly. They clearly are, which is why they are anti-intellectual demagogues.

I have been observing reaction videos on the American television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on YouTube and critically participating in them for the last couple of years and there are several things that I have found fascinating about them. But first a little demography, Most of the YouTube reaction videos I have been observing over the last several years have been posted by those who I will refer to as gensolescents, those young people who demographers would place in the Generation Zed and Generation Alpha cohorts, those young people, in other words, who came of age in the years after Buffy ended its seven year television run between 1997 and 2003 on the two netlets of American over the air commercial or linear television the WB and UPN (now the CW) .

I want to focus on one aspect of the reaction videos I have been observing and which I have found intriguing in this essay, age. One of the issues that continually pops up on many if not most of the reaction videos of gensolescents to Buffy is age. Many reactors have found the relationship between the sixteen year old Buffy, the chosen and charismatic (in Weberian terms) vampire Slayer, and Angel, a vampire born in Ireland in 1727 who was turned into a vampire in 1753, ewwwwy. They continually fail to take into account in their reaction videos the difference between Angel's historical or chronological age, he is around two hundred and fifty years when Buffy the Vampire Slayer begins, and his age when he is sired by Darla, a vampire sired by the Master in 1609, in 1753. This makes Angel literally 26, because, as the vampire lore of Buffy has it, Angel no longer ages biologically after he is sired by Darla. What makes the emotion based and normatively grounded ewwwwyness of reactors so interesting to me is that while the reactors are being literal in one way--they see an Angel who is over 250 dating a sixteen year old high school student, ewww--they are ignoring another literal fact in the Buffyverse--the fact that Angel ceased aging biologically after he was sired by Darla. To top it off, many if not most of the reactors aren't even aware of the contradiction making them akin to Christian fundamentalists who smooth over the contradictions and inconsistencies in their holy writ thanks to an amnesiac anti-intellectualism.

Another contentious age based normative ewwwwyness for many Buffy reactors on YouTube is the relationship between sometime Scooby or slayerette--this is what Buffy's sidekicks in the war against the vampires, the demons, and the witches call themselves--Cordelia Chase and the Watcher who replaces Buffy's Watcher and mentor Giles, Wesley Wyndham-Price in the third season of the show. Many if not most of the reactors find the relationship between the twenty something Wesley and the 18 year old Cordelia ewwwwy despite the fact that 18 is the age of consent in California, something almost none of the reactors have done any research on given the fact that many if not most of them have a pathological fear of doing research and prefer to watch Buffy tabula rasa, in an anti-intellectual way, in other words. Many of them even make the factual mistake of categorising Wesley as a teacher, which he is emphatically and factually not, increasing the emotional ewwwwyness factor in the process, another example of reactor anti-intellectualism and anti-empiricism. 

While anti-intellectualism has been around since time immemorial and in the United States even before there was a United States of America, postmodern American anti-intellectualism seems to have some unique aspects to it. One of these unique wrinkles seems to be tied to a social and cultural movement in American schools, a movement that prioritises self-esteem and respect for student opinions regardless of whether those opinions are grounded in empirical and factual accuracy or not, over facticity. And one can find this it is my opinion and it does not matter whether I can back it up with evidence or empirical criteria or not because it is my opinion and must be respected repeatedly in Buffy reactions on YouTube and in the comments sections of these reaction videos by those like killianlpc, a wonderfully appropriate YouTube handle for someone who prefers political correctness or pc to empirical accuracy and methodological competency, for someone who, in other words, prefers the anti-intellectualism of unverified opinion to theoretical, methodological, and empirical competency. 

Killianlpc, you see, is one of those YouTube posters who throws around godlike omniscient declarative sentences as if they were candy corn and it was Halloween. This episode, he/she routinely declared in his/her posts, was great, that was good, and the other was OK. However, when asked what criteria s/he based such claims on the best killianlpc could do was nada. He/she, in other words, could not name a single criterion on which he grounded these claims other than that it was his/her opinion and it had to be accepted and respected because he/she expressed an opinion. The fetishisations of the unexamined life. Like many other gensolescents who post on on YouTube, you see, killianlpc evinced little comprehension of the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder. 

While anti-intellectualism is rampant on YouTube anti-intellectual politically and ideologically correct censorship proved, at least on the basis of my admittedly selective observations, to be limited. During my participant observations I found only two proto-fascist or fascist reactors who either threatened or did make use of YouTube's ambiguous (the "may violate community standards" discourse), selective, and arbitrary censorship apparatus, Java and Java, an anti-intellectual who failed to comprehend that intellectual critique was not hate speech and who had a pollyannaish view of what posts should be like, who threatened to make use of YouTube's censorship power, and Brooke Whipple, an anti-intellectual who, like killianlpc, was pathologically unable to distinguish between intellectual critique and opinion and who fetishised opinions in a politically and ideologically correct fashion, who did avail herself of YouTube's censorship apparatus. Apart from Java and Java and Whipple most reactors and posters had an agree to disagree, if sometimes intensely and if sometimes adolescently (see Tyler Alexander, for example), live and let live attitude, something that distinguishes most reactors and posters from politically and ideologically correct proto-fascists or fascists like Java and Java and Whipple.  

And so the anti-intellectualism goes. Where is Karen when you need her?