A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cass Reacts GobFest, 2024

 

Many commentators have made much of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which was first diagnosed in 1902,  since the rise of the modern media like the telegraph, the telephone, and the wireless and postmodern or new digital media like social media since the middle and late 19th century. Some have even attributed what they see as a rise in ADHD to these new media and particularly to these new digital media.

Several studies, in fact, have attributed a variety of problematic symptoms to one of these brave new digital media forms, smart phones. San Diego State Social Psychologist Jean Twenge, for instance, notes that there has been a decline among iGens, those born between 1995 and 2012, in face-to face interactions including hanging out with friends, driving around, dating, sex, and engaging with family, an increase in loneliness and the fear of missing out or FOMO, one of the reasons many now have their smart phones with them at all time, engage in dangerous walking by looking at their smart phones while walking, and an increase in suicide amongst those with greater smart phone screen staring and sharing times compared to those who use smart phones less. Other studies have found that those who use smart phones more have trouble sleeping. Thanks to all this many social scientists  have pondered whether smart phone use and its consequences is leading to the de-socialisation and feralisation of those addicted to smart phones.

I, for one, am not sure that there has been a rise in ADHD since the rise of modern and postmodern media. Most humans, I suspect, have long had limited attention spans for a variety of reasons including television viewings of things like commercials, Sesame Street, and Music Television or MTV, which some contemporaries believed, because of their fast jump cut structure, were contributing to ADHD and its closely related Empirical Deficit Disorder or EDD. I don’t doubt that each of these media and others of their ilk, media and non-media, have impacted human culture and human psychology, particularly in the rich and media drenched nations of the core nation world. I don’t think, however, that ADHD or EDD has increased—assuming that the former has been present across historical time and cultural space, the latter almost certainly has—nor would I argue that one can at this point put the digital genie back in the bottle thereby changing humans for the better and bringing about heaven on earth, something many social engineers of all political stripes have been trying to do for centuries. What I do suspect or hypothesise is that with the advent of the new digital media like computers, smart phones, and the internet, ADHD and EDD, which I would argue are primarily a cultural and social psychological phenomena rather than, at least initially, biological ones, have become more noticeable because of the omnipresence of smart phones, computers, and social media sites like YouTube. 

As I have noted in these blogs before, I have been studying and doing the ethnography of the social media site YouTube for two years now. One of the things I have noticed in YouTube reaction videos is both ADHD and EDD amongst “reactors" Nowhere are both of these more prominent and more obvious than in the reaction videos of cass reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one that I have observed on YouTube reaction videos gabs the gob more than cass reacts while watching videos, pointing up, in the process, the problems associated with multi-tasking that scholars have noted for some time. Studies, like that done at Stanford, for instance, have shown that multi-media multi-tasking reduces the quality of a student's writing. It also appears to reduce viewer comprehension of what he or she are viewing. In a recent “reaction” to the seventh episode of the fifth season of Buffy titled “Fool for Love, for instance, cass reacts as a consequence of her cocktail of hyperactive gabbing and empirical deficit disorder, missed the fact that Spike, a vampire character in Buffy who has killed two slayers, got lucky when he killed his first slayer, a Chinese slayer during the Boxer Rebellion, in that episode. She apparently missed the fact that an explosion occurred while the slayer was about to slay spike and this explosion presumably of artillery origin, led her to drop her weapon, her wooden stake, one of the weapons that kills vampires in BtVS. And she missed the fact that Spike told us before the flashback that vampires have one advantage over slayers—they have their weapon on. them—while slayers have to reach for theirs, something the Chinese slayer was doing when Spike, thanks to the explosion, got the upper hand and killed, because the slayer had dropped her stake, his first slayer. Luck and skill.

Not all, by the way, is gob boom, gloom, and doom on cass reacts “reactions”. Cass reacts can be quite insightful about the relationships (not surprising given the prominence of emotion and emotional attachment in Western culture, a culture in which, generally speaking, emotions trump analysis) in Buffy after each episode she “reacts” to ends. See, for example, her reactions to the fifth season episode “Shadow” on YouTube. It is unfortunate that there is such a contrast to cass reacts' running “reactions” to each episode and her analysis after each episode is over because cass reacts has some interesting things to say once the gobfest ends and the analysis begins.