A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Culture, Ideology, and Social Blindness

 

There are a lot of problems on full display in “reaction” videos on social media sites like YouTube to see if one wants to and is able to. By and large, many if not most “reactors”, including the most intelligent and educated amongst them, display, on observation, a limited knowledge of the history of popular music, the political contexts of popular music, the cultures of popular music, the geographies of popular music, and the economic contexts of popular music. 

There are actually several“reactors” with a degree of reflexivity who actually realise the fact that they have a limited knowledge of the realities of popular music. This is why many make the argument that they want to come to whatever they are reacting to tabula rasa, with a blank slate, so there is no need for them to do research on a popular music song. There is, admittedly, a certain logic, if one of the multiple cultural logics that are out there, to this apologetic. It is a logic that leads to a practise that is not that dissimilar from the iron cage of popular music listening those of us who grew up with popular music and particularly rock and roll—which was more broadly conceptualised than it is today thanks to market segmentation and listener prejudices—were locked into at the time. We came to the songs we heard from an artist for the first time with limited knowledge of that artist. We, after all, lived in the world before the brave new digital media when new bands and new music really were new to us. We really did hear the music of these new bands somewhat tabula rasa. 

That said, we quickly developed prejudices about artists and bands and music we came to like or dislike, normatively grounded prejudices that impacted whether we continued to listen to or purchase the product of particular new artists then or in the future. I, for instance, fell in love with the Beatles when I was a kid and first heard one of their songs by on top 40 AM radio—the dominant form of the radio species that we listened to at the time--in 1963. I would go on to purchase every Beatles album and many of the extended plays and singles the Beatles released over the years. 

I also, as we humans tend to do in our more naive years—naive years that sadly never end for many—developed a manichean tinged binary related to the Beatles along with my childhood friends who also liked, or perhaps better put, loved the Beatles. This manichean binary led us, defensively, to dislike certain other bands or artists because we loved the Beatles. For us, the Beatles, were sacred and bands that competed with the Beatles artistically and economically, like the Rolling Stones, were profane. 

This manichean binary didn’t last, at least for me, very long as I quickly came to love songs by the Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, and a host of others. I quickly came to the normative conclusion that good music was good music regardless of whether it was by the Beatles or not. That said, I did continue to have a preference for certain genres and styles of rock and roll and I did have other musical prejudices that lasted for some time over the course of my life such as my unwillingness to listen to country music, something the Beatles changed my mind about when they covered a song by Buck Owens, a country star at the time, which I liked a lot.

The obvious problem, of course, with the tabula rasa argument proffered by “reactor” apologists, and the tabula rasa practise of us young music lovers, a problem you recognise when you start thinking empirically, is that we never come to anything, including music, tabula rasa. We are, for example, influenced in the music we have aleady listened to, either positively or negatively, by our parents, by our peers—something a recent experiment pointed up again recently--music gatekeepers, the radio, and by the television, for example. This means that what may sound reasonable initially—I don’t want to prejudice my listening experience of a song for the first time—isn’t really all that reasonable let alone rational from an empirical perspective. Instead it looks like a justification and rationalisation for blissful ignorance about, for instance, music cultures, music economics, and the politics of music.

I want to focus briefly on “reactor” ignorance, an ignorance revealed in their YouTube reactions, about how the economics of the music industry has and still does impact the music that is produced by the mainstream music industry. There are several “reactors” on YouTube whose YouTube “reactions”—they certainly do not constitute criticism, historical analysis, or the fruits of research and thus probably violate fair use or fair dealing exceptions with respect to copyright laws—betray an ignorance of the economics of the music industry. Those who whinge and whine about fade outs in popular music, for instance, miss the fact that one of the reasons for fade outs had to do with the fact that well into the 1970s singles dominated the popular music industry marketplace. A the time, it was a statement of faith among the suits who ran the music industry that singles, which were considered their profit making bread and butter, should be two to three minutes in length and no longer which is why Focus’s "Hocus Pocus”, Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4”, and Yes’s “Roundabout”,  to chose three examples among many possible ones, were released in shortened single versions to the mass radio audience in the United States, a mass radio audience which still listened to AM Top 40 radio and over which DJ’s, many of whom seemed less like music lovers than empty shils for the suits who ran the radio stations for profit, and whose reason for being seemed to little more than to spread the gospel of business advertising and the next single you should buy, itself a form of promotion. Speaking of talking over records, in the thank god for small mercies category, “reactors”, who are the equivalent of the AM DJs of today, at least, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, stop a song at some point or points so they can talk “over” it. Ain’t the brave new digital world wonderful?

In the early days of FM radio you could, at least for awhile, hear the longer versions of “Hocus Pocus”, “25 or 6 to 4”, “Roundabout”, and other longer songs, on free form countercultural FM radio in the late 60s and even into the early 1970s. where the DJ’s tended to be music lovers like ourselves. In the Dallas of my youth, for instance, I could and did hear bands like King Crimson, the Moody Blues, the Mothers of Invention, and others, on  a free form FM radio station in Arlington. Then the commercialisation of FM radio set in. This commercialisation and eventually centralisation turned free form countercultural FM stations into clones of AM radio and created an alternative format for listeners of an increasingly segmented and increasingly limitedly defined rock music landscape, album oriented rock, a form of rock that was harder than musics that were increasingly defined as pop. On AOR FM stations one could, for example,  listen to certain new album cut, album cuts that became the equivalent of singles on Top 40 radio. Additionally, pressure was put on the progressive rock bands one heard on countercultural FM radio who were told by the suits in no uncertain terms that they needed to write singles that the suits could sell in mass quantities to a mass audience increasingly defined in increasingly segmented terms. Those who were able do that, like Kansas and Genesis and eventually even Yes, did.

This ignorance of the industry emphasis on singles and the history of the realities of rock radio is just the tip of the ignorance appears to be bliss iceberg that one finds in “reaction” videos on social media sites like YouTube. “Reactors” seem not to know much about the history of payola in popular music (something that still goes on if in a roundabout way as Rick Beato and company note), the hierarchical structure of the music industry with its multiple ways to take percentages from artists for their “services”, the impact or lack of impact of the FCC on media, the political power of economic elites including music industry elites, the history of rock genres, the different cultures of rock including the culture that grew up around the ideology of authenticity in the mid and late 1960s and early 70s, the role popular music elites played and play in how artists sound in the studio and in what they wore or wear, and the different lyrical strategies of popular artists (satire, parody, metaphor, allegory, and so on), to note only a few of the political, economic, and cultural aspects of the world of popular music that influence how popular music is made and what it “says".

In the end, of course, none of these empirical facts really matter to most “reactors” on YouTube. Most “reactors” live in a mental world where they have been socialised not to look beyond more individualist factors and a world in which they have been socialised for conformity only to consider whether one likes or doesn’t like an artist and his, her, or their musics. And while liking or disliking something, including popular media on social media reaction videos in the brave new digital world, has been impacted by economics, specifically, the fact that “reactors” make advertising monies along with social media outlets like YouTube, most “reactors” seem to have been able to convince themselves (false consciousness?, the social and cultural construction of reality? rationalisations?) that they aren’t pandering to their demographic for the purposes of making a “buck” even though many, including some of the more genial and knowledgeable “reactors” who have turned themselves into marketable commodities, clearly are. Whether they actually love the music they are listening to, thus, is an open question.

And so it goes…

“Informants": I “observed" a host of reactors including but not limited to Rob Squad Reactions, Andy and Alex, BrittReacts, DatOne Reacts, Mike and Ginger, Hanier Family, VerdyChannel, HarriBest Reactions, Trash Talkers, MyIndie Productions, Dana’s Faith, DashyXDandDadReacts, Kerry Tries It, The Wolf HunterZ (a and b), AileenSenpai, Bars and Barbells, Millie Mochi Tunes, JustLP, Reactor2Drummer, Sing with Emma, the Charismatic Voice, Vinand Sori, the Thamesmen Too, Virgin Rock, Lost in Vegas, Maggie Renee, the Vocalyst, Brad and Lex, L33Reacts, Archive Jem Reacts, Life with Recklezz, Asia and B.J., Sight After Dark, John Slop, NicknLex, Brit Pops React, Rayactions, Trash Talkers, Jamel_AKA_Jamal, Alex Hefner, Dean Bros, Virgin Rock.

It needs to be noted that many of the “reactors" on YouTube also “react” on Patreon, a monetisation site, which, according to Patreon’s capitalists, allow those using their service to create “community”.  On Patreon commodities, in the form of human reactors, are commodified and extract moneies from "patrons". Though I have not visited Patreon it is clear that many commodified “reactors” have their “patrons" vote for what they will listen to or watch and react to next and offer them “rewards” for “patronising” them via monthly financial support. The owners of Patreon, of course, take a cut (8% to 12% “commission”) from these “reactor” labourers” patron pledges. Some “reactors” sell “merchandise” to supplement their income.