No one has explored the commercialisation of everyday life more broadly and more intensively than Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild in books like The Managed Heart and in the papers collected in her book The Commercialization of Intimate Life. In The Managed Heart Hochschild found that those working in retail in capitalist societies developed emotional strategies to successfully traverse the mine field that is the service or retail sector of the economy, the dominant sector of the capitalist economy in postmodernist core nations. Hochschild’s emotional labourers, such as the airline attendants and bill collectors she studied, match, she argues, their emotions to their job. Airline attendants develop cool and calm emotions and demeanours to assure passengers, many of whom have qualms about flying, that everything is safe and thereby assure them that everything is going to be alright and that they will enjoy their flight experiences. Bill collectors, on the other hand, develop emotions to deflate those they are trying to get monies from in order to guilt trip them, trick them, and threaten them to pay the bills they owe.
On YouTube, a media form that seems to have been made of the postmodernist service sector age—it is, of course—most “reactors” engage extensively in a form of emotional labour. Most “reactors", develop emotions to assure viewers that they care about what they are reacting to and plead with them or guilt trip them into liking their “reactions", subscribing to their “reactions", or going to Patreon—where many of the reaction videos to films and TV shows start life—to support their “reactions”. They engage in this emotional labour in order to get their viewers to financially support them and their “reactions” in order that they can make more “reaction" videos and thereby earn more monies, perhaps even enough money on which to make a decent living or to supplement monies they earn from other sources.
I don’t mean to imply here that some “reactors” don’t do “reactions" for something other than financial support and financial gain. Some do. Intellectual labourers like Fil from Wings of Pegasus, for instance, engages in public service digital broadcasting when he explores the role tune correction software and not live “live" performances are playing in the popular music industry and “live “ on stage these, something that says something about the cyborging of human life. Ellie Anderson, professor at Pomona College, part of the Claremont Colleges, is performing a public service by educating potential watchers of her videos about the history of philosophy and its various schools of thought. But they, those in the knowledge sector of the postmodernist economy, are, in my experience, the few, the proud, the empirical “marines” of social media just like they are in broader society.
Social media’s emotional labourers foreground the existence of what social anthropologist and sociologist Erving Goffman referred to as front space and back space. Goffman argued that all the world is indeed a stage and we, all of us on the stage that is life, are merely players on the large stage that is life. On this stage the actors of everyday life have a front stage and a back stage. They portray to those they engage in performative interactions with, some of which are ritualistic and formulaic, the image of themselves that they want their larger interactional audience to see and feel. Generally speaking, most actors develop a front stage that others, their peers, will like. They want to be adored. They also, Goffman argues, develop a back stage, a part of them that they generally want to keep hidden or try to keep hidden from those they interact with, a part of themselves they don’t always want their broader audience to know. Only a few actors, like the drummer of the Canadian band Rush, Neil Peart, reveal this back stage in a forthright way, something Peart does in his lyrics to the Rush song “Limelight” from the album Moving Pictures or the writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer do in the sixth six of that television show when Buffy’s writers portray fanboys and fangirls as adolescents in need of growing up (not to mention the fictional character of Cordelia Chase in Buffy). But then Peart and the writers of Buffy (and Cordelia) were “cult" celebrities for whom any stigma for criticising fans for wanting to express their public devotion to him or for portraying the very fanboys and fan girls who adore Buffy as adolescents in need of growing, is unlikely to result from these reveals given the fame and the intense love and devotion fans or groupies have for Rush and for Buffy.
Many of the “reaction” videos on YouTube problematise this division between front stage and back stage. Many “reactors” try to be genuine and authentic in their reactions wanting us to believe that their front stage is their back stage and vice versa. The problem—and this is as true of real life as well—is that given that they end up heaping all manner of praise on the films, television shows, and musics they watch and listen to it is next to impossible to know whether they really mean what they say or not since viewers have no first hand face-to[face experiences with these “reactors". Only a very few, such as Rob Squad Reactions and Wilburn Music Reactions, actually say in their “reactions”, at least on occasion, that they don’t really like what their audience has requested they listen to. It is hard, in other words, to know whether they are engaged in surface acting where they really don't believe what they say and are reacting in the way they are, which is what I suspect is largely the case, for other reasons, such as financial gain, or whether they are engaging in deep acting, life’s version of method acting, where they actually do believe in what they are saying for whatever reason, something that may be as much a function of deep socialisation or peer pressure as “authenticity”. And it is hard to rise above peer pressure. Needless to say, the confusion of front stage and backstage is evident in the live not live performance of so many post baby boom pop performers today.
Finally, social media sites like YouTube validate, in part, what Sly and the Family Stone observed many years ago, that everybody is a star. Given the impact of the mass media, mass media such as Hollywood films and television and popular music, for instance, and the apparatus that surrounds stars, many in today’s core nations seem to want to be stars. YouTube gives them that opportunity. Like the media of old, however, only a few can really attain the stardom and celebrity they seek. And only a few will be able to make a living off the “stardom" they attain on social media. And let’s not forget that for many of these celebrities celebrity may be fleeting and turn into a nightmare thanks to our gotcha gossip oriented I hate you now TMZ society. Needless to say, this state of affairs is not that different from stardom and celebrity in the past. Just ask all those silent film stars who could not make the transition to talkies and Katharine Hepburn.
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