A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: More Maps of Misreading

 

As I noted earlier, humans are, for cultural reasons, inherently ethnocentric. When a group creates an us, a group of insiders, whatever that insider group happens to be, they also have to create, via an equal and opposite reaction, a group of outsiders, a them.

This categorisation of some into us's and others into thems can take many forms, including a manichean, us good, them bad, form. This manichean form of identity classification and categorisation, of course, has dominated human culture for millennia and continues to dominate human culture today in alliance with a parochialism that mixes and matches human ignorance with human arrogance. 

In the brave new world of postmodernist digital media this manichean ethnocentrism is widely available for empirical viewing on a smart phone and a computer near you as I recently found out while doing participant observation research on and about social media. Needless to say social media sites like YouTube are a boon for the ethnographic observer and analyst who now doesn’t even have to leave the comfort of his or her armchair in order to travel to a not so exotic exotic culture any longer.

I recently stumbled on two possible if not probable culturally and ideologically driven maps of manichean misreading while doing ethnography on YouTube. The first was “reactor" Brooke Whipple’s “reaction" to one aspect of the the fifth season Buffy the Vampire episode “The Replacement”. In The Replacement" Xander, one of the original Scoobies or Slayerettes, is split into two halves, a suave Xander, who most “reactors” believe is not the real Xander, and a joking to hide his self-doubts Xander, the Xander who most “reactors” assume is the real Xander. At first the Gang is unaware that both Xander’s are the real Xander split into his confident and self-doubting halves by the demon Toth. Once  they realise, thanks to observation and research that both Xanders’ are real they devise a strategy to put broken Xander back together again. As they are preparing to do this Riley, Buffy’s ex-military boyfriend and graduate student in Psychology at the University of California-Sunnydale remarks, in what is clearly coded as comedy, satirical comedy, that the two Xanderses make him want to lock both of them up in a room and perform experiments on them, a reference, of course, to social scientific and particularly Behavioural Psychology twin studies. Not getting either the tone or the reference Whipple responds that of course Riley would want to do this since he is with the government.

Now, there is no doubt that states and nations have a distinctly checkered record when it comes to the treatment not only of their own citizens but of alien others as the deportations that occurred in the US in the World War II era, the lies associated with the US prosecution of the War in Vietnam including claims about North Vietnamese attacks on American ships and the massacre by American military of civilians at My Ly (one that recalls massacres of First Peoples by American troops and civilians in the 19th century), and US military experiments on pacifists with LSD make clear. However, private capitalist corporations and universities, public and private, also have a checkered past when it comes to truth telling and experimentation as well. See, for example, GM’s attempts to defame Ralph Nader for telling the truth about one of their cars and corporate experiments in Taylorism. So, the arises as to why Whipple chose to single out governmental nastiness while simultaneously ignoring corporate and academic malfeasance? Is it because Riley was in the US military? If so, why did Whipple not note what should be obvious to anyone with an empirical mind at this point, namely, the historic links between corporations, the government, and the military, public and private? Knee jerk manichean government evil, private bureaucracies good on the march? I suspect so.

The second example of potential knee jerk manicheanism in YouTube “reaction” videos I stumbled across were the many sensationalist Doctor Who is about to be cancelled “reaction” videos by “reactors” whose journalistic and scholarly credentials and expertise are questionable, to say the least.  No group of fans get more proprietary and red faced about their object of desire and devotion than Doctor Who fans, a fan clique that has been around since the mid-1960s. Doctor Who fans whinged and whined about the meta Doctor Who of the Douglas Adams years. They whinged and whined about the revival of the show in 2005 wandering if would do justice to their nostalagiased and romanticised memories of the show. They whinged and whined when David Tennant passed the torch to a new Doctor. They whinged and whined when Jodie Whittaker became the first female Doctor. They whinged and whined when Disney+ signed on to do Doctor Who with the BBC, something that required series fourteen of Doctor Who to become season one of Doctor Who again. They whinged and whined when Ncuti Gatwa became the first Black British Doctor, Doctor 15.

Recently, Doctor Who devotees (and one suspects those who have no devotion to Doctor Who but who are devoted to having their politically and ideologically correct way) have been boo hoo hoo and running around like chickens whose heads have just been chopped off prophesying that Disney+ is about to cancel Doctor Who because of its low ratings. In fact, ratings, for the nu new Who have been, as one Disney executive is quoted as saying that the ratings have been good though not stellar and Disney+ and the Beeb have just moved forward on a Doctor Who spinoff, hardly evidence that backs up “reactor” claims that the death of Who is imminent. They have also been conveniently forgetting that Doctor Who ratings have ebbed and flowed ever since the show came on the air in 1963. 

Given this empirical fact—the ebbing and flowing of the Who audience numbers—one invariably has to wonder if something else, something hidden, something below the surface something devouring from below is going on that accounts for all this whinging and whining about the most recent series of Doctor Who. Is it race, perhaps This type of whinging, of course, parallels all the whinging and whining that went on when Jodie Whittaker became the first woman to play the role of the Doctor.  If past is prologue one has to wonder whether some Doctor Who fans and some of those right wing populist ideologues who fancy themselves as warriors in a culture war for the soul of the universe (seemingly playing out their version of a pulp science fiction film in their comic book imaginations) can no more stand a Black man in the role of the Doctor than they could stand a White woman in the role of the Doctor. Manichean culture on the march? I suspect so.