A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The New Labours of Herakles

I have long thought that some enterprising millennial/ GenX/GenY/GenZed/GenA, whatever, "Neo"-Klassikal scholar needs to update the twelve labours of Herakles or Hercules for the postmodernist GenMil digital age. I humbly submit that one of the "Neo" GenMil labours of Herakles, perhaps number one on the list--I know, after all that these GenMils do like their top ten or top one hundred whatever lists--should be research.

Now don't get me wrong, I know how difficult empirical and scientific research is in an age where the information of the world is at one's fingertips. After all, one has to actually type something, the labours of Herakles, for instance, into a search engine search box in order to find out something about it, something clearly much more difficult than having to get up off of a chair, keep walking to a library, or find transportation to an archive, things one had to do in those bad old so much easier days of cheesy yore. 

I suppose it is the immense difficulty of this task, of this "Neo" GenMil labour of Herakles that is research, that accounts for the fact that the vast majority of GenMil reactors to the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on that lower than lowest common denominator YouTube which likely accounts for why some 99% of reactors have an aversion to doing research on the show. Unfortunately, this act of slacker physics has consequences. Most reactors, for example, reactors who have little conception of how classical narrative works brought up on a steady diet of 24 to 32 page comic books and comic book movies with little plot and character development that they are, criticise season one of Buffy in that patented Monday morning quarterbacking fashion so beloved of the post-baby boom cohorts, without actually scientifically studying it and doing empirical research on it. The problem here, of course, is that if they actually did, god forbid, research on the show they would find, if they did their research properly and scientifically, a big if in the age of populist postmodernist fantasy, that the intention of those who created Buffy and ran the show during its first season was to construct a season one of the show that could be built off of in season two, should the show be renewed,  or to provide a satisfying end point for the sho if it wasn't renewed. But, of course, if these latter day Christopher Columbus's did this they might discover empirical data that might problematise their happily anti-empirical and anti-intellectual faux "opinions", "opinions" whose goal is not the empirical accuracy of the examined life but the Mammon grounded motive of profit, the god, jesus, and holy spirit all rolled into one, of the market is god and everything is a commodity life. These reactors are, you see, we want your money commodity aesthetic fetishists of the bliss inducing unexamined life.

The anti-intellectualism of the fetishised unexamined life is, of course, not new. Anti-intellectualism has been around for ages. Scholarly researchers have found it in Ancient Greece, in Ancient Rome, in the Dark Ages, in the Spain and North Africa of the Moors, in civil war England, and in British settler societies like the United States with its anti-Catholic, its anti-Mormon, its anti-Jehovah's Witnesses, its populists, and its anti-academic fundamentalist literalists, which is what most of the reactors on YouTube kind of are. After all in the same way that anti-academic fundamentalist literalists believe they don't need to do any research or any language studyin order to accurately understand the Tanakh or the Bible, GenMil reactor literalits believe they don't need to do any research in order to accurately understand Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And so it goes.