A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

 

You always know what you are going to find on social media. You know that you are going to find a lot of lowest common denominator nonsense about the usual suspects, for example, films, television, women (some scantily clad for the “adolescent” male gaze), politics, sports (including fabrications related to Caitlin Clark), banal and mundane sensationalist and melodramatic clickbait for fun and profit, and music. You never know, however, how low the rubbish you find on social media will go. I was reminded of this fact yet again while I was looking at books by Warren I. Cohen on Amazon, one of the lowest of lowest common denominator social media sites on the world wide web given its poor search engine, its limited and I suspect mostly bot curation of its comments page, a curation that looks for certain hot button words and phrases, and the limitations it places on actual scholarly reviews. Amazon seems to prefer “reactions” that are reflective of the widespread reality of attention deficit disorder in postmodern America and large parts of the core nation world.

I am familiar with Cohen, a specialist on American foreign policy retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County  and author of introductory books on American foreign policy, including his excellent and aptly titled A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations published by Columbia, his introductory work on US and USSR relations published by Cambridge University Press in its four volume history of American foreign relations series, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991, and studies of Asian-American foreign relations, which is why I went to Amazon to see what other books he had written.

What I also found and found as interesting as the other books Cohen had written, were the comments on his book America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Two of the four comments—the fact that there were only four tells you a lot about the contemporary core nation world—on the book were favourable. The other two comments, however, were negative.  Of course, you are going to invariably find negative comments on almost any critical history and analysis of American foreign policy because you are inevitably going to step on the toes and draw the ire of the many faithful churchgoers of the Church of America who believe in the dogma of American exceptionalism.

One of these negative comments, that by Josh, was more “substantive” than the other, that by Sol D. Josh’s “reaction" to the book—I hesitate to call it a review since it really isn’t a review as is the case with most posts on scholarly books on Amazon—whinged about what he believed was Cohen’s New Dealism and his supposed belief that the New Deal was the best of all possible American worlds. He complains that Cohen interprets American post-WWII militarisation and the rise of its national security state as something other than a response to Soviet imperialism. He whines about Cohen's book being too much of an introductory text, something the book, in fact, is.

Sol D’s “substance” is also a statement of faith. Sol D’s faith is more clearly than that of Josh that hybrid mix of Christianity and America that has long been prominent in American culture and American life. He spends his reaction whining about Cambridge histories being the product of apologists and polemicists for “butt kissing atheist-Marxist tyrannical dictatorship”, a dictatorship, he claims, killed 200 million of its own citizens (today, of course, any self respecting empiricist would have to number many of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite, particularly in places like the Silicon Valley and Austin, amongst the tyrannical dictatorship of the mediocretariat). He ends his diatribe by stressing his devotion to his lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Both of these comments reveal, as I noted, a faith in America, a faith some theologians would argue is a form of heresy and blasphemy. The faith of both is ultimately grounded in metaphysical and metaphysical manichean presuppositions that some humans are good guys, generally the group, clique, community, state, or nation, in this case the United States of America, that one belongs to, and that other humans are bad guys, that other whoever the goods mark themselves off against, the USSR in most of the mid-to late twentieth century, and, after the fall of the USSR, those liberals and “New Dealers” who are seen as “commies” and, paradoxically, fascists, by many and are categorised as “commies” and fascists by demagogues looking for leverage to gain political, economic, and cultural power. They are grounded, in other words, in the notion that some humans are good and some humans, them, are evil. They are grounded in the dehuhamisation of these others.

And this last—dehumanising the other—is one of the fundamental problems with these manichean politically and ideologically correct ways of seeing. Contrary to such manichean faiths humans, to varying degrees, are characterised by their better angels and their less better angels Humans, real humans, be they Hitler, Stalin, those who ordered bombs dropped on civilian targets in the name of victory, or true believers in monotheistic religious inquisitions, are, as history shows, complex and contradictory. They are neither inhuman incarnations of pure evil or cliched and stereotyped incarnations of pure goodness. Those who see the world in such manichean hues, of course, can’t admit the fact that humans, particularly those humans in positions of power (the power corrupts prover ), are the same every where and at every time for if they did they would have to admit that Cohen and other empirically grounded analysts like him are right and that both American and Soviet powers that be are neither evil incarnate of good incarnate and that humans can and do make mistakes and, of course, they can be socialised for moronic ethnocentric conformity. Cognitive dissonance, as it often does, however, in these cases, often ends up making the faith of true believers  even stronger than it was despite empirical facts to the contrary because in so many cases fiction, created reality, trumps, as it does with Trump and his ilk, real reality.