A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: We Are Team Socialised for Media Reading Conformity

 

Most humans across time and across space have been and continue to be socialised for manichean conformity. They, thanks to cultural socialisation, come to embody a knee jerk manichean ideology that automatically makes them read “us”, whoever us is—ones family, ones kin, ones tribe, ones nation, ones state, or ones clique, to note a few examples of how ethnocentrism works in everyday life—as good and “them”, whoever them is—the them category is dynamic and changes as times change as when the Soviets replaced Nazis as the comic bookish evil in the American and Western Cold War universe—as bad. For many Americans past and present, for example, America the Good, America the Kind, America the Gentle, America the Compassionate, America the Leader of the “Free World”, America God’s Country, America the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, is the essence of good in the universe. For many Americans the Russkies are bad, the essence of evil in the universe because they, at least in part, are the very essence of not us, the antithesis of us. For many Americans Israelis are good even though they are, at the moment, engaged in actions and behaviours that are not that different from the Russkies in the Ukraine (or the US everywhere for that matter) because they are our friends and we like them so they must be good just like us.

This culture of manicheanism is present in all realms of human life whether the economic, the political, the geographic, or the demographic, something that points up the fact that it is ultimately culture rather than economics, politics, geography, or demography that makes the human world go round. Many Americans, who are socialised for manichean conformity, for instance, believe that the economic system of the US is the best because it is the economic system of the US (culture and ideology as tautological), that the political system of the US and its foreign policy is the best because it is the political system and the foreign policy of the US, believe that American geographic space is best because it has been blessed by god or by a teleological nature, and believe that Americans are god or nature’s chosen few because they are Americans and Americans are by “definition” good. Culture, meaning, faith, and belief are thus at the heart of Americans self-image of their nation and of themselves. Culture, in other words, undergirds and provides the scaffolding for the comic book like American religion of Americanism, a religion in which America and all that it stands for is the essence of goodness in the universe. America as a comic book.

This is not to say that there are not cultural contradictions in American society and other societies where the same cultural forces and ideologies operate as well. There are. However, those who can see through the socialisation for conformity curtain that hides the wizard of ideology behind it and see reality in the process are few and peer pressure and a host of other pressures (see the work of Emile Durkheim and Howard Becker on deviance and the social and cultural construction of conformity which is always in operation in everyday life) from a variety of cultural, economic, and political forces, including the media, the cultural institution and industry that melds them all together, are a major factor in why conformist humans always wear that happy we are the best face in their public and private lives.

One can readily see this culture of manicheanism at work in reaction videos on social media sites like YouTube. Looking at “reaction” videos on YouTube lifts the curtain to show the critical observer how the culture of human manicheanism works and how it generally leads to misreadings and misinterpretations of texts that operate and work outside of the manichean box to some degree. 

I have been, as I have noted before in these blogs, doing ethnography on YouTube. I have specifically been exploring “reactors” reacting to the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Doctor Who in order to explore how this manichean culture of ideology permeates most readings of these television shows and how it works and functions to maintain manichean conformity.

The work of manichean culture in Buffy is apparent in how many, actually most, reactors read Buffy’s theodicy, interpret Buffy’s notion of evil. Buffy begins with a manichean notion of evil. Us humans good. Them demons bad. Very early on, however, Buffy complicates and makes messier its conception of evil. In the season one episode "The Pack”, for instance, Xander, one of the good guys goes bad thanks to demon possession, something that despite the fact that Xander is possessed by evil raises questions about the blanket good and evil binary ideology that Buffy begins at in its very first episode "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest” given that Xander is supposed to be one of the good guys, one of the Slayerettes. In the season one episode “Nightmares” Buffy’s Dad says some harsh and nasty things to our heroine, a heroine most viewers, one assumes, identity with because she is our heroine, because he is a manifestation of her nightmares, nightmares in which Buffy, who is coded as the good guy, believes she may the cause of why he and her mother split up. The episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” begins to turn the mean girl viewers love to hate, Cordelia, into the sometime Scooby viewers hate to love, something that continues in the next episode, the season finale, and in seasons two and three. 

The second season episode “Lie to Me” furthers deconstructs Buffy’s there is good and there is evil and the twain doth not meet ideology in the character of Ford, who wants to become a vampire because he has an incurable fatal disease, and thanks to Giles, Buffy’s mentor. In the final scene of the episode Buffy asks Giles to lie to her about the nature of evil in the Buffyverse. He tells her that you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys by their varying characters and by their different appearances to which Buffy responds, and rightly so given Buffy’s world building up to this point, “liar”.

Season three of Buffy even further complicates the theodicy of Buffy. Season three is full of doubles of the shows main characters, all coded as white hats (a coding some “reactors” don’t grasp thanks, perhaps, to the decline of the Western, the genre that often recapitulated America’s good guy image of itself) or good guys revealing the similarities and differences between them and pointing up, in the process, how but for the grace of god goes I in all of them. Buffy, who earlier had the buy the book Kendra as a doppelgänger, now has the not by the book doppelgänger Faith. In the episode “Bad Girls/Consequences” the similarities between Buffy and Faith are foregrounded. Faith, who has long felt like an outsider due to a host of circumstances including being made to feel like an outsider by Buffy and her Scooby comrades in arms. Under the influence of her Faith side, however, Buffy's bad girl and Nietschean side begins to come to the fore only to be submerged again as a consequence of Faith’s killing of a human being and her lack of remorse about it. Xander and Willow have their dark and skanky VampXander or AltXander and VampWillow or AltWillow. Xander has his literal double who is sometimes played by his actual double in the fifth season episode The Replacement". Giles has his Richard Wilkins III (who is actually Richard Wilkins I and II too), the mayor of Sunnydale, someone who is “good enough to be concerned about potential gas leaks in the Sunnydale sewers but who is evil enough to want to become a demon who devours the youth of Sunnydale. When Faith becomes the mayor's enforcer he becomes a father figure to her just as Giles is a father figure to Buffy.

Despite this clear complexification of evil in the Buffyverse many viewers miss the increasing complexity of Buffy’s theodicy. Most “reactors” knee jerkingly interpret the relationship between Faith and the mayor as one of evil Svengali to innocent slayer. They can’t comprehend, at first at least, that the mayor actually cares about Faith—how can he, they knee jerkingly assume, since he is evil, and Faith is pure, or so many want to believe. Some even—cognitive dissonance at work?—try to turn Faith into a spy who is collecting information on what the mayor is up to so she can report it to the Scooby Gang. Others miss the fact that Buffy tells Faith that the demon Skyler, who wants to sell them the Books of Ascension which are essential to the mayor’s plans, does not fall in the dangerous category and so does not have to be killed, something Faith has a problem comprehending, pointing up, in the process, the fact that she has not had the experience with the complexity surrounding demons Buffy has

Season four of Buffy continues to deconstruct the good and evil binary that is so much a part of human socialised for conformity culture. Buffy and the gang ultimately refuse to kill the ostensibly evil vampire Spike who has been neutered thanks to a trip to the Initiative vet. The Initiative, the big bad of season four, whose manichean militaristic view of evil—evil is evil and always bad including Willow’s werewolf boyfriend Oz—is contrasted with and counterpointed to the Scooby Gang, something foregrounded in Buffy’s speech to Riley about the complexity of evil and the problems associated with a manichean world view in the episode “Goodbye Iowa”. Magic, which some have historically seen as evil, becomes central to the triumph of the Scoobies over Adam, the Initiative’s one man scientific killing machine.

Despite this complication of Buffy’s theodicy many continue to tow the manichean good is good and evil is evil line. It is only in the fifth season, a season in which Dracula reveals pertinent information to Buffy about who she, the slayer is, Vic and cass reacts, for instance, finally grasp the fact that Buffy’s theodicy is as complicated and messy as that of Buffy’s companion show Angel. In fact, the complexity of Buffy’s theodicy set the table for the complex nature of evil in Angel. Is this misreading due to culture and Ideology at work? It is the function of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder? Empirical Deficit Disorder at work? Or is it the consequence of all of the above at work? Given that ADHD and EDD are social and cultural constructions just like manicheanism I am going to go with the last, with the caveat that I suspect ADHD and EDD along with Historical Deficit Disorder and Research Deficit Disorder, are largely social and cultural constructs as well.