A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Movie Night with Jacqui Reaction Show

 

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD and its closely related companion Empirical Deficit Disorder or EDD aren’t the only related disorders prevalent and noticeable on social media sites like YouTube. One can also readily observe two other closely related disorders, Research Deficit Disorder or RDD and History Deficit Disorder or HDD, on social media as well.

Like ADHD and EDD, RDD and HDD have likely been around for some time. They are not recently discoveries maladies by Psychologists newly appended to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of the psychological set. Rather they have likely been around for some time, well at least since humans organised themselves into small scale and large scale agricultural societies.

One can see contemporary examples of both RDD and HDD on many if not all "reaction videos" posted by the latest in postmodern media commodities or wanna be commodities on the social media site YouTube. Take Movie Night with Jacqui, for instance. On the Movie Night with Jacqui Show the commodity known as Jacqui, who like other “reactors” on social media seems more interested in making a buck than in enlightening the masses, claims to be or to have been a film student perhaps at USC, if the graduation certificate that appears in the background of at least one of her “reaction” videos is a guide. 

What is fascinating about film student Jacqui is that she appears, at least on the evidence of her reactions to the first two episodes of the Joss Whedon created television show Firefly, to be plagued by both RDD and HDD. Firefly, as those who have done some historical research know, is clearly a hybrid of John Ford’s Stagecoach (an adaptation of Guy De Maupassant’s famous short story "Boule de Suif"), Howard Hawk’s cinema of professionalism and stoicism, Shakespearean and Hitchcockian multi-tonality, and Hitchcockian suspense. Jacqui, however, is either unaware of all this or doesn’t think it is worth commenting on—too heady for the masses for our money conscious “reactor”?—something I find odd for a self-proclaimed student of cinema. Even if Jacqui is, as the evidence suggests—her remarks on shots and staging, for instance—in the filmmaking track rather than the Film Studies and Film History track, one would nevertheless expect, given that she studies or studies film and film making, as Wesleyan Film Studies student Joss Whedon knows well, is learned, at least in part, by watching, paying attention to, and learning from the masters of cinema in the same way that one can learn how to write, paint, and research by studying the great masters of the past, I would not expect commodity Jacqui to either miss or ignore such critical information about Firefly. But then this is the postmodernist world where research and history are passé, the Reithian remit is kaput, and emotionally grounded reactions are the name of the social media moneymaking game just as they have been the name of the manipulate humanity game at least since the Ancient Greeks.