A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cult of the Plastic Fantastic

 

Once upon a time authenticity meant authenticity in the core nation world. I, for instance, grew up in an era when more people in the West and in North America than the usual handful of bohemians and dissidents were questioning the supposed verities and nostrums of Victorianism and striving for authenticity in their questioning. Scholars have attributed this rise in scepticism and the movements undergirded by this scepticism in the post WWII world to a host of economic, political, and cultural factors including the defeat of fascism in World War II, liberal utopianism, the post-war economic boom that lasted into the 70s, the post war baby boom, the optimistic rhetoric of youthful politicians like President John F. Kennedy in the United States and Pierre Trudeau in Canada, the post war expansion of higher education and the increase in the numbers of students matriculating at universities, suburbanisation, the civil rights movement, anti-imperialisms movements such as the opposition to the French and American imperial war in Vietnam, and the sense that one could actually change the world that undergirded many of the social movements of the era.

This questioning of "traditional" verities and nostrums had an impact on a variety of things in the West including economics, politics, and culture. In popular music in the United States, for instance, it led to a revived and increasingly popular, if only in relative terms, socially conscious folk musics in places like the Village in New York City, in Los Angeles at places like the Troubadour, and in San Francisco, places that made artists like Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and others into countercultural celebrities. The post-war folk movement in the US with its emphasis on authenticity and the social criticism of racism, war, and mutual assured destruction, would eventually have an impact on rock and roll bands such as the Jefferson Airplane, Love, the Byrds, and even in the Beatles as evidenced by the Dylanesque and melancholy John Lennon song "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" on their 1965 album Help.

The US, of course, was not the only place which saw a revival of folk music performance, interest in folk musics, and notions of authenticity in the post WWII era. Folk music revivals of a somewhat different character than that in the US arose in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Ireland, England, and Scotland. This Canadian, Irish, English, and Scottish folk revival and its accompanying ideology of authenticity can be heard in the music of bands like Figgy Duff, Steeleye Span, and Planxty. As was the case in the US the Canadian, Irish, English, and Scottish folk music revivals also these bands had an impact on the rock and roll, something one can hear in the music of bands like Great Big Sea, the electrictrified folk of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, several Thin Lizzy songs including "Emerald", and in the folk influenced albums of Jethro Tull and the Strawbs.

Another genre of pop and rock music that was impacted by the folk rock revival was the singer-songwriter movement of the era, a genre that included artists like Joni Mitchell, Carol King, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, and even, if briefly, Elton John, whose first four albums clearly fall outside the singer-songwriter fold, artists many listened to with great attentiveness rather that the shake your booty approach of many concert goers of today. Like the folkies and the folk rockers, pop rock's singer-songwriters placed an emphasis on authenticity. Those who privileged authenticity, or so they believed, were in a revolt, in part, against what the Jefferson Airplane called the plastic fantastic, that smiley faced happy happy joy joy organisation suburban man we are the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen were socialised or propagandised for conformity into in the years after WWII.

A lot has changed between the 1960s and today. Rock, including the singer-songwriters of the 1960s and after, isn't what it used to be. Postmodernism--economic, political, and cultural--is increasingly hegemonic in the core nation world. Selective and situational globalism is the name of the economic game in the rich parts of the globe. Californication and Disneyfornication increasingly dominate global popular culture where plastic fantastic fakeness and simulations dominate the lowest common denominator brave new digital media just as it did the old, if in a more populist way. The new digital media just spread the fakeness and commodification around more.The art cinema which was once significant in the West has been pushed to the margins. Commodification continues apace and has even broadened. Anti-intellectualism has regained its dominant hegemonic position in the wake of the counterculture particularly era in the West and even more particularly in the English settler societies.

One of the things that is or should be quite obvious to even the casual observer of social media like YouTube is how inauthentic YouTube is. Most "reactors", for instance, seem to be reality star Kardashianista wanna bes. They post images of themselves on social media which mimic fashion magazines and Hollywood red carpet poses. Most of them mrror the anti-intellectualism which has often dominated the West. They revel in their intentional ignorance of what they are reacting to whether a movie, a television show, or a song. They reflect a frowning correct puritanical culture dominated by happy faced conformist Pollyannaisms. Most YouTube reactors are clueless about how parody and satire work. In a postmodernist world core nation world, in other words, inauthenticity with its deep acting and surface acting reactors, the plastic fantastic, has become the measure of the "authentic" for so many of the post baby boom generations, the gens, who have built an online world where virtually every poster is a commodity not only for YouTube but for themselves, and where almost every potential viewer is a latter day voyeur.

YouTube and its monopolistic owner Google doesn't, of course, care about the fakeness they commodify and help sell because they make money off of the anti-intellectual tripe that dominates a social media world that is narcissistic, paranoid, conspiracy theory ridden, and amateurish (every person their own reactor regardless of their expertise). Many who post this stuff often appear to want to live out their dreams of becoming celebrities in a world where fake deep acting and cynical surface acting is the golden rule. Many, in other words, want to be a star but hardly anybody is a star in this brave new digital world of mediocrity, hubris, ignorance, and banality. And, of course, many of them also want to sell their brand. In many ways, the new digital media is nothing more than one infinite and continuous commercial dominated by that newest of human devolutionary forms, Homo Geekonomicus.