A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Nobody Does it Better Than Me Mentality

 

Someone once claimed that everybody was a critic. That is perhaps an overstatement. Perhaps it would be better to say that everyone, particularly in the core nation West, is a whinger and a whiner. 

Many right wingers, for example whinge and whine about the decline of Western civilisation and want to ban, censor, or, in that wonderfully exemplary banal phrase of the brave new banal digital age, cancel, those things--literature, films,  educational courses of study--that they believe to be aiding and abetting the decline of Western civilisation whether in the US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, or Western Europe. The jeremiads of the politically and ideologically correct populist right generally involve, in some way, shape, or form, a moral panic about "new" or "modern" notions of sex, gender and ethnicity, including race, and the role education and schooling plays in disseminating these new ideas about sex, gender, and ethnicity to their apparently naive, innocent, and defencless children. 

Many liberals, and particularly those who believe that the arc of history always bends in the direction of justice for all, whinge and whine about those who they see as standing in the way of human progress. and human liberation Paradoxically, the politically and ideologically correct jeremiads of progressivist civil rights liberals are not that dissimilar from those of the populist right since they too are focused on "modern" notions of sex, gender, ethnicity and race, and the role education plays in disseminating  "modern" and liberating ideas about sex, gender, ethnicity to children desperately in need of enlightenment and liberation.

The new social media have, as Jill Lepore notes in her excellent history of the United States, These Truths, played an important role in expanding, spreading, and exacerbating this broad culture war between the "traditionalists", who are less traditionalists than Victorians, and the progressivist liberators. They have also played an important role in expanding and spreading the notion that everyone can be and should be a cultural critic. Culture criticism, of course, has been around for ages. Aristophanes, for instance, criticised the cult of war and Socrates in his comedies of the Ancient Greece of the fifth and fourth century BCE. The Frenchman Francois Rabelais satirised what he saw as the folies of his era, the Renaissance. The American ex-patriate Stanley Kubrick and his American and British collaborators darkly satirised the madness associated with nuclear war with its mutual assured destruction, MAD, in Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

There has long been another stream of criticism, however, cultural criticism, the criticism of works of art whether paintings, sculpture, plays, literature, films, and television, for example. One variety of this form of cultural criticism has been associated with intellectual culture, an intellectual culture that has long had ties to the world of publishing with its books, magazines, and newspapers. This form of cultural criticism has typically been the province of critics who, while they may be less about doing art than writing about and commenting on art, still have an intellectual understanding and grasp of how art "works" and functions. Film critics like Stanley Kauffmann, John Simon, author of a superb scholarly work on Ingmar Bergman, and Andrew Sarris engaged in a form of  film criticism that was highly scholarly and intellectual, for example. 

Another strain of cultural criticism has been, more "democratic" or more accurately populist in orientation. One might call this the everyman or everywoman "school" of cultural criticism. One can find it in fanboy and fangirl cultures that stretch back at least to the mania surrounding Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes in the Victorian era. One can find it in the intellectual and fanboy and fangirl cultures associated with television shows like Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One can find it in the intellectual and fanboy and fangirl cultures of Jane Austen criticism, fanboy and fangirl cultures that focus on and often decry the adaptations of Austen works for film and television that don't live up to the "standards" these fanboys and fangirls set for them. What all of these fanboy and fangirl cultures have in common is a belief, some might call it a conceit, that they, amateurs that they are, could actually make better entertainments than the professionals who are actually engaged in making entertainments for the masses. 

One can find both of these forms of culture criticism on social media platforms like YouTube if not in similar concentrations. Specialists or professionals, those who actually have studied what they are commenting on or reacting to on social media are a small minority on YouTube, but then they were also a minority in the world of culture and cultural criticism in those eras dominated by communication forms like books, magazines, and newspapers and later movies and television. Social media platforms like YouTube are dominated by fundamentalist and evangelical like fanboy and fangirl amateurs who tend to be literalist ignoring, for whatever reason, any discussion of other levels in cultural texts including the metaphorical and allegorical, the mythological, and the contextual (economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic). They tend to lack an understanding of how classical narrative worked and works given that they have generally been secondarily socialised into a world where films and television programmes really don't have much in the way of classical narrative composition, little in the way of narrative complexity, little in the way of character complexity, and little in the way of plot complexity but are high in roller coaster narrative and plot simplicity and in brand redundancy, genre redundancy, and disposability. And let's not forget that they really don't read many classic works of fiction grounded in classical narrative forms or many works of fiction at all. They tend to be inscribed within cultural and ideological notions of realism that are irrelevant and which lead to the tyranny and fascism of a limited and limiting notion of realism, a tyranny and fascism of "realism" that limits the artistic forms films are supposed to take and which has resulted in a form of "criticism" that is awash in trivialities such as gee that nose would never remove itself from someone's face and live the life of a titled Russian. Finally, many of them operate on the assumption, some might call it a delusion, that they, amateur reactors, can actually make a better film or television programme than the professionals who actually make films and television programmes. This may be true, social media's amateurs may be able to come up with a better script than those who wrote the scripts for the mediocre Gilligan's Island, though such a contention is certainly arguable and I doubt that they can, than a more traditional work of art like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I should point out that both of these forms of criticism, the intellectual and the everyman and everywoman or populist form of criticism, can also be found in other "domains" of Western culture. They can be found in, for instance, the intellectual and the everyman and everywoman is a Bible interpreter regardless of whether one is educated or not discourses of American Christianity. And that is why, I think, one can credibly argue that the populist form of cultural criticism, a kind of intellectual anti-inellectualism, is akin to the populist varieties of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism, also types of intellectual anti-intellectualism, with their everyman and everywoman is a valid interpreter of the Bible despite how little schooling they have. I should also note that fanboy and fangirl cultural "criticism" is fickle. I, for instance, recall much gnashing of teeth and whinging and whining about the Graham Williams and Douglas Adams era of Doctor Who, the reflexive or meta era of the show in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Williams was producer and Adams was script editor. Today, many Who fanboys and fangirls now regard that era as one of the best periods in the history of the show. Times they do a change don't they?