A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Reactors that Ate Their Own Tails

 The human species, as those with even a degree of self-awareness and reflexivity know, is an arrogant "race". This arrogance may or may not be a problem. I have no problem, for instance, with human "arrogance", a word often used as a term of abuse by intellectual anti-intellectuals, that is grounded in empirical knowledge, an arrogance often tempered by that old proverb that the more you know you know and the more you know the more you also know that there is still much to be known. That is enlightenment.The arrogance grounded in ignorance, an arrogance characteristic of, I suspect, around 99 percent of those who post videos and comments on that lowest common denominator of media forms, social media, is not a a valid form of arrogance. Rather it is an act of intentional or unintentional social lobotomisation. It is the arrogance of moronicity. It is the arrogance of those who prefer the Kingdom of Bliss and the Kingdom of Idiocracy to the critically examined life (socialisation for reality challenged  yes sir no sir conformity).

I have been studying "reactors" to movies and television shows on the social media platform YouTube for several years now. A number of things have struck me about these "reactors" as I have noted in previous entries in my online ethnographic notebook. The one I want to briefly talk about in this blog post is, as I have already hinted, the arrogance of the know nothings on YouTube, the arrogant ignorance of those who intentionally or unintentionally know little to nothing about what they are reacting to. One caveat, however, before I get into my discussion, In my ethnographic sojourn on YouTube movie reactors, many of whom have clearly have studied film in university, are, as a general rule, much more knowledgeable as a rule about the classic they are reacting to than those reacting to television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Doctor Who and contemporary popcorn movies with little in the way of plot and narrative sophistication. That most of the moves that come out of Hollywood these days are narratively and intellectually challenged is, paradoxically, something the pop top "reactors" on YouTube code in normative fashion, as a positive, as a good. They see, in other words, the simplistic manichean melodrama that undergirds most Follywood films as "evidence" of their quality since for them the new is always superior to the old and those films are new. Apparently these "reators" don't realise that such a teleological ideology dooms their own radiant era in ouroboros tail eating fashion. but hey, such is "intellectual" the norm in the brave new digital era of ever and ever better social media.

Not all of this our films and television shows are better than those of the stone age ideology can be attributed to the unshock of the new, this our era is superior to yours because our technology is better than yours teleology. This progressivist ideology has been around since ancient times with ithat era's belief that the apocalypse would bring about a world that was better than the present one. This eschatological ideology, an ideology that was tied to a restoration of paradise, Eden, was eventually, in the Renaissance and after, allied to a chronological teleology that saw each epoch as better and more utopian than the last. You can see this ideology expressed in the notion that the films and TV programmes of the past are technologically inferior to those of the present. The talkies are better than silent films ideology, for instance. Realism, whether mise-in-scene or acting style, is better than artsy fartsy surrealism and expressive acting style, for example  You can also see it in the normative notion that as film and later television moved further and futther away from theatre, films and television became better. Such an apologetics and polemics disdains the the "talkative" films of Joseph Mankiewicz such as his All About Eve, the "talkative" films of John Sayles (for my money one of the best of contemporary directors, which means he is not working much these days), and "talkative" televised electronic theatre television programmes like the original Upstairs Downstairs because they supposedly are too gabby--an odd criticism from those who claim that silents are inherently inferior to talking films) and hence aren't cinematic nor attentive to mise-en-scene. The fact that it can be shown empirically that these supposedly inferior films are well written and actually attentive to mise-en-scene, is not even on the radar of these holier than thou "reactors". They seem to be blissfully unaware that theatre was one of the first of the art forms to reflect on mise-en-scene and put it into practise. That such moralising disdain is ideological rather than empirical is pointed up by the fact that many enjoy the films of Mankiewicz, the films of Sayles, and Upstairs Downstairs and can and have successfully and intelligently analysed the mise-en-scene of each. Socialised eyes of the beholder man.

These facts are, of course, are immaterial to the self-righteous crowd, to those who conflate ideology, apologetics and polemics with the reality they so claim to prize, at least in film and television if not in real life. And this amnesia, dear reader, is an act of arrogant ignorance and ignorant arrogance, an act one finds so prevalent among so many "reactors" on the YoobTube, an act one finds throughout the history of anti-intellectualism. Praise Yah and pass the spamunition.