A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Why the Brave New Postmodern Digital Media World is Much Like the Brave Old Modern Media World

Since the 18th and 19th centuries mass capitalism has been the dominant economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic system in the world and particularly in the western world that gave it birth. On this fact both the major apologists and polemicists for and against mass capitalism, Adam Smith and Karl Marx respectively, agree. 

Mass capitalism is an economic system, a system of exchange, with its own theology, a theology propagated by the high priests of mainstream economic theory who postulate—though they don’t see it as postulation hence the use of the term theology here--that humans are rational and that human greed is ultimately good for all. It is an economic system that dominates western and increasingly global politics because modernity and its mass capitalism are bureaucratic and the higher in the bureaucracy one is the more monies one makes and the more power and authority one has. This allows those in the higher realms of the bureaucracy to use their power and authority, to leverage their status, in a multitude of political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ways. They lobby, for instance, the American government and have a greater ability to lobby successfully compared to those with middling power and authority and those with low levels of power and authority because in capitalist societies money, as the proverb goes, talks. It allows those with money, power, and authority to use these monies and this power and authority for cultural purposes. When they buy art they impact the “value” of the art they buy. When they contribute monies to symphony orchestras they impact the type of music that will be programmed. When they engage in risky behaviours that come back to haunt them the world has to listen because, as happened as recently as 2008, their “coughs” wreak havoc on the increasingly integrated global economy. Those with monies typically live longer, have less deaths in childbirth, and have less child deaths than those with moderate or limited monies who live in poverty.

The noted Swiss film maker Jean-Luc Godard, a director who has been categorised as part of the French nouvelle vague or New Wave by critics and historians, often used the “profession” of prostitution, as a metaphor for mass capitalism in his many films. In his 1980 film Suive qui peut (la vie), [English title Every Man for Himself], for example, Godard stages a scene—I hope I am remembering this right as I have not seen the film since it was released--in which a businessman, sitting at a desk choreographs a scene for his entertainment in which one of his cronies has sex, including anal sex, with a prostitute while another character in the film voyeuristically looks on. The message of this film, of course, is that workers are exploited by their bosses and their sycophantic flunkies in the lower upper levels and middle levels of capitalist bureaucracies, something that makes the English title of Godard’s film not quite accurate given the realities of power and authority imbalances within economic bureaucracies.

Godard, of course, is a polemicist who critiques capitalism in Suive qui peut (la vie). One does not, however, have to buy into Godard's normative polemics for the exploitation scene in the film to be descriptively accurate. Those in the highest and higher levels of capitalist bureaucracies do have more power and authority than those beneath them (pun intended). They do have labourers working underneath them (pun intended) who do their bidding, at least officially. They do make more money than those in the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy. And the relationship between capitalist bosses and those beneath them (pun again intended) is one akin to that between a john and prostitute, one in which the john pays for a commodity, in this case sex, and one in which, arguably for some, he or she who is paying and playing is in an exploitative relationship with the worker who is doing the work, in this case the exploited sex work.

Though Suive qui peut (la vie) was made in those days of yore before the postmodern age with its digital media arose, very little has actually changed in the brave new postmodern digital world. The economy is still dominated by the few. These few oligarchs who run the few dominant corporations of the economy continue to, while not monopolise power and authority hold the lion’s share of it and as a consequence have a massive influence on the political culture of the West, which itself dominates the global economy. They continue to maintain this power and authority thanks to the greater social, economic, political, and cultural capital they have and which they are able to transfer to their heirs via primary and secondary socialisation. They continue to believe that they are the best and brightest and blessed by nature and/or god. They continue to benefit demographically from a system, particularly in the United States, in which economic, political, cultural, and demographic—health care, for instance--is inequitably and irrationally distributed (irrational because of all the unnecessary redundancies in the US health care system). Despite all the initial utopian rhetoric that the internet would bring “liberty" and “freedom" and “democracy” (all ultimately empty vessels into which are poured several cultural meanings) to humankind the internet, including its numerous porn sites, remain dominated by mega or uber capitalist bureaucratic corporations like Google, Amazon, Mega (formerly Facebook) and Apple, to note a few, and massive inequities. 

As I have noted previously on this blog, I have been engaged in ethnographic work for several years on the social media site YouTube which is owned by Google. Google, like many capitalist bureaucratic corporations of the modern era, is an economic giant whose earnings rival the gross national and gross domestic products of some nation-states around the world. It is a political giant lobbying governments in its interests. It is geographical giant in t that it is global. It is a demographic giant in that millions if not billions of consumers “buy” or “consume" its products, products that for some have no inherent value since it is, they argue, impossible to quantify the value of knowledge labour. And it is a cultural giant.

Despite the rhetoric of utopian digital media cheerleaders social media forms like YouTube are quite similar to other cultural and communication forms of the past. Like capitalist cultural communication corporations of the past social media forms are bureaucratic with remuneration, power, and authority inequitably distributed within them. Like capitalist communications bureaucracies of the past there are those who work for the communications corporation and those who run the corporation. YouTube, for example, like other social media corporations, takes a significant cut of the revenue generated by its “employees”—something many would argue is inherently exploitative--along with advertising monies it generates and plays, as did and does commercial television, over its videos unless one buys a VIP package from the corporation. Like capitalist media corporations of the past those who run the brave new digital communications corporations establish standards for the corporation and censor that which does not meet those corporate community standards. Like capitalist corporation communications forms of the past “employees” can be “fired. YouTube”employees”, for instance, who do not bring in enough revenues—reportedly 10,000 views over a period of time—are made redundant. Like the knowledge industries of the past the brave “new” social media are not interactive beyond the comments sections boxes below the videos in YouTube which may or may not be read by those who make the videos largely for monetary gain that voyeuristic consumers watch on social media sites like YouTube, comments, including the comments of most of those who do the reaction videos of films and television shows themselves, that are largely mundane and banal—lowest common denominator--and focused on a summary of the story and plot and whether the reactor and commentator liked what was being reacted or not. In other words, they, generally speaking, function in order to establish a community of the like-minded with their like-minded echo chambers and ostracisation of any who “deviate” from the constructed or fetishised norms. In this regard they function like most films and television shows of the past and like society and culture in general, they recapitulate socialisation for conformity and create and recreate, in the process, self-satisfied and self-righteous identity groups which are ethnocentric, hardly the cosmopolitanism some polemicists for the brave new digital media envisioned in their radiant brave new digital future narratives. Like capitalist corporate communications media of the past avant-garde artsiness and real critical criticism is barely present on social media, the content of which is mostly a vast wasteland of popcorn culture. Like the corporate media of the past Western media, and particularly American media and American English predominates. Social media, in other words, continues to mirror broader society and culture.

The more things change...

Musings on Me, Me, Me and Greatest Good for the Greatest Number Liberalisms

 

When looked at dispassionately, something most people are unable to do, of course, there have clearly been two forms of liberalism that have dominated the core nation world of wealthy Northern and Western European states and European settler nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand since the Enlightenment: narcissistic or me, me, me liberalism and greatest good for the greatest number liberalism. One of the reasons this obvious fact has been missed and continues to be missed by so many, of course, is because of the dominance of demagoguery faux mass democratic societies.  For the vast majority of masses, fed as they are on the often delusional, conspiratorial, and manichean binary ideologies of the elites, ideology creates "reality" and one of the realities ideology has created is the ahistorical notion that narcissistic liberalism, particularly in its right wing populist form, is actually conservative when it isn't.

Laissez-faire or narcissistic liberalism, whether in its elite, middlebrow, or populist form, has been the dominant or hegemonic of the two, dominating many Western nation-states until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Utilitarian liberalism briefly dominated Western political culture from the Great Depression to the oil crises, deindustrialisation, and globalisation of the 1970s through the 1990s, all of which, in turn, allowed economic oligarchs to regain whatever political and economic control they had briefly and not always cheerfully ceded with a vengeance. While utilitarian liberalism has not disappeared and is stronger in some Western nations like the Scandinavian countries of Europe and in some intellectual circles even today, narcissistic liberalism came to dominate in nation-states, particularly in those nation-states that really mattered like Imperial America, the dominant economic, political, cultural, and geographic power of the post-World War Two era.

There have been and are a host of myths associated with both forms of liberalism. Laissez faire liberals like to talk the free trade talk but have had and continue to have no problem accepting government wealthfare and of engaging in the monopolistic and cartellistic managerial practises associated with corporations pointing up the hyperbole or hypocrisy of their keep the state out of the economy rhetoric. After all, if Adam Smith is right and the economy works best all on its own, managers are unnecessary. Narcissistic liberals have also developed ideologies--one assumes it helps some of them sleep at night--by which they convince themselves, or at least convince others, the demagogued masses, that greed will raise all floating boats despite the reality that only a very few boats actually float, a fetish that points up the theological and dogmatic underpinnings of narcissistic liberalism. 

Utilitarian liberalism, despite its reformist rhetoric, has often been limitedly reformist in practise. Its elite political practitioners, after all, have had and continue to have close ties with economic elites and its political practitioners are hardly, as is true of virtually all politicians and of all humans for whatever reason, immune to the personal "pleasures" of plunder and power and the perquisites that have typically accompanied both. Utilitarian liberalism, in other words, reminds analysts that they need to explore the always present differences between rhetoric and reality. As with the narcissistic liberals utilitarian liberals have developed their own comforting myths that presumably help them sleep at night including the one that they really want to help the poor and American minorities though they have never been really able to clairfy how they can do this by cosying up to the economic elite and doing much of their bidding just like their narcissistic liberal kissing cousins.

One of the fundamental problems for the once seemingly invincible greatest good for the greatest number liberalism  (seemingly invincible from the vantage point of the early 1960s) today is that core nation-states have become too big, too unwieldy, too complex, too one size fits all bureaucratic, too impersonal (at the same time that it is dominated by oligarchic personal networks), too distant, and too consumerist (I buy therefore I am) oriented, to be able to manage the corporation that we call a core nation-state today. This inability of elites to be able to manage large territorial and governmental entities is almost certainly one of the reasons, money and power and the global nature of megacorporations are others, for the revival of political, economic, cultural, and geographic regionalism we have seen in federalist states like the US, Canada, and Australia since the oil crisis, deindustrialisation, and globalisation. 

The solution to this state of affairs would seem to be obvious: core nation-state downsizing, a downsizing that would play out in the development and emergence of smaller nation-states like Quebec or alliances between regions such as that along the west coast of Canada and the US. Of course, there are countervailing forces which make the obvious solution to deal with the multiplicity of problematic "issues" difficult including nationalism with its associated delusions and its inherently manichean and hence binary hallucinations amongst them my cock is bigger and harder than yours militarism and holier than thou populist Big State paternalism.

You Say Legitimate While I Say "Legitimate"...

If there anything that produces more crap than the mouths of politicians and their journalist running dog lackies I don't know what it is. The Western powers that be talking heads have been uttering a word from Kiev to Berlin to Washington DC over the last several days, that word is “illegitimate”. According to politicians and journalists all across the Western world, politicians like Britain’s Conservative Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs William Hague and journalists like NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, the elections in the eastern part of the ethnically and culturally divided Ukraine, are “illegitimate”.

“Legitimacy”, of course, and this appears for whatever reason not cross the minds of politicians like Hague and journalists like Nelson, is not some transcendental or universal phenomenon that was given by god to humankind from some distant mountain in some distant past. “Legitimacy”, as Max Weber made clear some years ago, is cultural and ideological. Governments, people, institutions, votes, whatever, are ascribed legitimacy because people, for whatever reason, usually ideological, believe they are “legitimate”. Usually, individuals or institutions are considered legitimate because leaders or the institutions they lead are ascribed legitimate charismatic, traditional, or bureaucratic authority.

It is during times of crisis with "legitimacy" thrown into confusion that those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear can and may see that notions of "legitimacy" are really situational and relative. A recent example of how situational or relative "legitimacy" is, is clear in the differential Western responses to the interim government in the Ukraine and the referendums that took place in the eastern part of the country over the weekend. The powers that be in the West maintain that the unelected government of the Ukraine which came to power in a coup is "legitimate" while the referenda held in the largely Russian eastern parts of the Ukraine are "illegitimate". How such referendums that were held in the Donbas are any more or less “legitimate” than the unelected government in Kiev is, empirically speaking, unclear. What is clear is that the West, the US and the EU, wants and has worked its imperial magic to establish a government in Kiev that is friendly toward them so they can box Russia in and make it impotent in the great power struggles of the early twenty-first century. A sign of how far the West is willing to go is its mad support for presidential elections in the Ukraine in late May while the country is in a state of chaos. This itself tells you something about the what America’s powers that be and its EU lackies are up to.

How many people will buy the ideological and imperial crap coming out of the mouths of the Western powers that be remains unclear. One poll found that the less people in the US know about where the Ukraine is the more they want to intervene on the side of the "Ukrainians". Needless to say the powers that be prefer their “citizens” to be ignorant because that means it is easier for the powers that be to manipulate the masses through their propaganda arms including the media. A sucker, as they say, is born every minute. And that is what is really trul scary in the modern world, suckers are born every minute, suckers who, unaware, eat up the ideological gruel their leaders feed them on a regular basis.

Finally, a question remains above all of this relativistic ideological fray, why is that the powers that be in our world so afraid of votes on greater local autonomy for regions within national borders in an age of global economic integration?

'Open Your Eyes See the Lies Right in Front of You'

So the media is making hay of a conversation between US President Barack Obama and French President Sarkozy at the recent G20 meeting in Cannes in the south of France. A private conversation between the two at the meeting about Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where they referred to him as a liar was picked up on a microphone and now the media, including BBC World, is making much hay out of it. Beyond the media a host of knee jerk right wingers drunk on the demagoguery of the American right are now doing their five times a day anti-Obama catechism complaining about Obamhole, the phrase one of these civil "intellectual" types refers to the US president as on Yahoo.

Interestingly the same poster who slurs Obama goes on to make yet another slur, this one against Jews. Tom the Bomb, as our poster refers to himself--presumably this passes for wit among right wing posters--claims that Jews just love to be tortured. Presumably what Tom the Bomb is trying to say here is that Jews continue to support Obama ergo they are torturing themselves because anyone who supports Obama must revel in being tortured. I suppose Tom the Bomb thinks of this as a kind of peculiarly Jewish form of self-hatred. This Jew, however, isn't in love with Obama. But he likes the Republicans even less. Remember one of them recently, if memory serves, uttered an anti-Jewish slur. Tom the Bomb just made another.

Tom the Bomb is not alone in typing anti-Semitic slurs online. Yet another right wing Republican type has ambled to the Web and is also making anti-Semitic slurs on Yahoo. The aptly named Diablojailisco who, as his post makes clear, accuses Jews of controlling American finance including, presumably, the Wall Street investment houses that brought the US and much of the world into economic bust in 2008. Apparently in the perverted mental worlds of some right wingers the Jews were responsible for the collapse of 2008. Not derivatives, not greed, not a lack of government regulation but Jews who are apparently conspiring to destroy the American way of life. What is it with the right and Antisemitism?

Meanwhile back on the Sarkozy, Obama, and Netanyahu front. Sarkozy and Obama by calling Netanyahu a liar have actually gone up slightly in my estimation. Netanyahu is a liar. He has lied on a number of occasions for a number of reasons.

Of course, all of this raises one obvious question: do politicians lie and do they have to lie? American politicians of all stripes have been very economic with the truth on a number of occasions. LBJ lied about the Tonkin Gulf. Richard Nixon lied about far too many things to list. Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra. George H.W. Bush lied about raising taxes. Bill Clinton lied about having sex with that woman. Bush le petit lied about so many things but I only have time to note one: lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now don't get me wrong, this lying is not entirely the fault of politicians. Most Americans prefer to hear lies about the nature of war rather than to understand what war is really like. Most Americans seem to prefer to hear lies about taxation because they want government services without paying for them. Most Americans want Julia Roberts and Richard Gere to get together at the end of Pretty Woman despite the fact that street ho's rarely get glass slippers from wealthy capitalist shock and awe traders. I suspect that most of these right wing blowhards on Yahoo will continue to prefer to live with the myths and lies of right wing demagogues rather than with the truth of history. This is the pathetic ethnocentric, xenophobic, racist, and anti-intellectual world that the American right wing has created. This is the ethnocentric, xenophobic, racist, and anti-intellectual world I have to wake up to every morning.