A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: What YouTube Tells Us About the Cheesy State of Intellectual Life in the English Speaking World

I am increasingly convinced that nothing tells us more about the desultory nature of intellectual life in the English speaking world than YouTube reaction videos. Recently I ran across YouTube reaction videos on the first episode of the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest" by Java and Jave and to the tenth episode of season three of Buffy, "Amends" by Haarute. Nothing, I think, better encapsulates the dismal state of scientific literacy and practise than both of these YouTube reaction videos. Reaction is, by the way, a rather appropriate term for these at best mediocrities since there is really not much thought behind them as a general rule.

One of the things that both Java and Java and Haarute harped on was an ill defined term that seems to have become the knee jerk mantra of post-baby boom cohorts, "cheese". In"The Harvest", the second part of the first episode of Buffy, Java femme made the claim that some of the acting in that episode was "cheesy". Haarute, on the other hand, seemed--I say seem because like so many kids stuck in adolescent development he wasn't precise in his terminology--to use "cheesy" as a synonym for Dickensian sentimentality and melodrama. As I wasn't clear on how these kids were using "cheese"--they clearly weren't using it in scholarly or systematic and analytical fashion and they clearly were not using it as a synonym for trite or hacknayed--all I got from Java femme was that the "cheese" was in the extras, the acting extras. All I got from Haarute was a substanceless deflection and--though largely unsuccessful--an attempt at wit. When I pushed both for a more precise, systematic, and scientific definition of the term the best our reactors could offer was, in the case of Java femme, substanceless repetition, something, I suppose, appropriate to a medium that is in itself repetitive in its genres and tones. It, "cheese", she repeated, is in the fried cheese extras, and silence. Haarute, on the other hand, offered nothing of substantive value, something common among those engaged in YouTube reaction videos for fun and--limited--profit.

Interestingly, another poster on the Java and Java "The Harvest" thread was more up for the reasonable challenge of defining "cheese" and "cheesy" than was our Java female. He actually did try to offer a more precise definition of the term, one interestingly blissfully ignored in subsequent replies by Java femme. According to the poster M.S. "cheese" was a synonym for "inauthentic" acting by extras.

There are so many problems, as I pointed out to Java femme, M.S, and Haarute to no avail--Java femme soon knee jerked into that curious mixture of anti-intellectualism, arrogance, ignorance, self-righteousness, dogmatism, and cry baby cry snowflake mode so characteristic of amateurs--with both of these "definitions" that it is difficult to know where to begin our critique of the use of the term. Let's begin with the term itself. If "cheese" is inauthentic than the use of the term "cheese" by these kids is clearly inappropriate. Cheese is real. Velveeta, processed cheese, somewhat inauthentic cheese, would probably be a better term for supposed television acting inauthenticity. But let's not forget that many post baby boom fanboys and fangirls have never been particularly known for either their aesthetic use of the English language or for their scientific precision.

Another problem with the use of the term "cheese" is that the use of it by these two reactors is ahistorical. The conception of cheese as a synonym for inauthentic is grounded in a realistic conception of television (and by extension, theatre, film, literature, and popular culture). The problem here, of course, is that television (and by extension theatre, film, literature, and popular culture) are not real. They are economic products that use editing, tone, genre, mise-en-scene, music, and visuals to manipulate reality by turning a representation of reality, at best, into a story, into a narrative with a plot and even, if too rarely, character development, all in the hope of getting people to watch so that those who make film and television ca, in the process, make lots of monies. Television (and theatre, film, literature, and popcult) is, in other words, inherently inauthentic. Even documentaries are not realistic for the reason that they too manipulate "reality" through editing, tone, genre, mise-en-scene, music, and visuals. When this fact was pointed out to both Java femme and M.S. the only response I got something that did not surprise me, dead silence, something one would expect from those ill educated in science and the call and response nature of intellectual culture.

A further problem with the use of the word "cheese" to describe a supposed inauthentic style of acting is that this use of the term is ahistorical. Those who throw it around like tossed salad don't seem to grasp the historical fact that acting has never been singular. There have long been various approaches to acting across time, across space, and within time and space. While both the method and Brechtian approaches to acting, for instance, are equally grounded in notions of realism, the notions of realism and the acting practises they give rise to are different and inconsistent with each other. There has thus never been a singular notion of what "realist" acting is. Finally, notions of what constitute realistic acting has never been consistent across time within space. One suspects that the psychological realism of the method actor Marlon Brando would not be considered realistic by our fangirl Java femme or our fan boy M.S., today. The realism of past generations, in other words, is not necessarily the realism of the historically illiterate generation of post-baby boomers today. Unfortunately, given their ethnocentrism, their fetishisisations, and their ahistoricism, I suspect both Java femme and M.S. would argue that acting is more realistic today than in the past. Perhaps they will live long enough to hear the realism they argue for referred to as cheesy by future generations of historically anemic young people.

Another problem with YouTube reactors and the videos they grind out for money is the general lack of knowledge each of these reactors have about the very show, its tone, and its genres and the history of the medium and research on it they are engaging. Java femme seems blissfully unaware of the history of satire, black comedy, and parody and the acting strategies associated with each, which are themselves multiple. Haarute seems blissfully unaware of the long history of melodrama and he seems blissfully unaware that, if we link melodrama to inauthenticity in order to try to square the "cheesy" circle, that humans have historically loved sentimentality and melodrama in the stories they tell amongst themselves and in the stories, the fairy tales, that are told to them. The fairy tale film Pretty Woman (1990), for instance, a reworking of Cinderella, was  despite its inauthenticity, quite popular at the domestic box office as were and are many of the hyper-unrealistic superhero films that come out of Hollywood in droves.

Then there is the problem of the term itself. Is "cheese" a synonym for parody, satire, black comedy, melodrama and the acting styles associated with each?  If so, why use an imprecise term like "cheese" when more precise terms that have been used for years are available to describe these varying general acting styles? Additionally, we should not forget that Buffy itself is multi-tonal and hence parodic, satiric, and dark comedic styles and forms of acting may be intentional on the part of those who made the television show.

Finally, there are the acting issues themselves. What does it mean that extras are "cheesy"? They are extras, after all, and do not have speaking parts. Is it in their smiles, their frowns, their quizzical looks? In the way they walk? in their gazes? in the way they move their eyes? Is it in the way they move their heads? in the way they dress? in the way they walk into a classroom? If the answer is yes to any of these or similar others it is incumbent on the person making the claim to detail precisely how the extras are acting "cheesily". Needless to say, neither Java femme or M.S. do this pointing up just how lacking in scientific precision and analytical skills their "approach" is.

All in all, the imprecise, ahistorical, and lazy use of the term cheese by the younger generations is sadly reflective of something going on in the broader core nation English speaking world, namely, a lack of education and schooling in critical approaches to television and beyond, and in scientific approaches to texts. Science, after all, strives for precision rather than imprecision. In the end, perhaps, "cheese" and "cheesiness" is best understood as an inauthenticity of approach by some human beings, particular those human beings engaged in offering reaction videos on YouTube and other social media sites. And while this has long been a common problem it is now, in the brave new world of digital media, simply more noticeable because of the omnipresence of reaction videos like that of Java and Java and Haarute, reaction videos which point up the lack of historical and scientific literacy amongst even the semi-schooled in English language core societies.

 

The Books of My Life: One Nation, Two Cultures

 

Polemics and apologetics are, of course, two sides of the same demagogic coin. Demagoguery itself has a long history both inside of and outside of academia. The Athenian leader Perikles, for instance, warned of the potential influence of demagogues during Athens's war with Sparta. Many of the early Christian fathers proudly identified themselves as polemicists and apologists as they argued for the falsity of other faiths or meaning systems and proclaimed the truth of their own. Many true believer monotheists have engaged in polemics and apologetics ever since, though many have not acknowledged the fact that that is what they do. Polemics and apologetics have been central to American, Canadian, and Australian political culture almost since the "birth" of those British settler societies.

The academy, at least since the late 19th century, thanks to the impact of positivism on the hard and soft sciences in the ivory tower, have, at least in their official rhetoric, abjured polemics and apologetics in favour of empiricism, though some might argue and several have that empiricists have proclaimed their value freeness way too often for as Max Weber noted in the early twentieth century what academics choose to study reflects, on some level, the values of the researcher. 

Despite their proclamation of value neutrality academics have, on occasion self consciously and almost messianically waded into polemical and apologetic waters. Historian Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History (1998 and 2007) and historian Keith Windschuttle's Who Killed History (2000), for instance, are, respectively, apologias for "traditional" Canadian and "traditional" Australian history as they define it--an emphasis on "traditional" political history and the great men who helped make it--and polemics against Canadian and Australian social and cultural histories, which they see as arising out of the cultural ferment of the countercultural 1960s, an era they generally bemoan and see emblematic of the decline of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. An American variant of this argument can be found in historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (New York, Vintage, 1999, edition with a new afterword, 2001). 

While Himmelfarb trods terrain similar to that of Granatstein and Windschuttle, her polemic and apologetic is more broadly focused than either those two, who focus their gaze on education and more particularly on higher education. Himmelfarb, like Granatstein and Windschuttle, sees academia as impacted by post-1960s social and cultural historical fads. She traces these, as has become common among intellectual conservatives in Canada, Australia, and the United States to the situational pluralism, multiculturalism, and relativism of the sixties counterculture, which, she argues, has now become the dominant cultural strain in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America.

While Himmelfarb claims that the cultural ideologies of 1960s counterculturalists have become the dominant paradigm in the United States since the 1970s, a claim some might dispute given the fact that the US seems evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, exemplars of liberalism and conservatism (really "traditional" liberals) and right wingism respectively in fin-de-siecle and early twenty-first century America and little in the way of bipartisanship in the American federal legislature. Himmelfarb argues that there is also an oppositional culture of dissent from this pluralist, multicultural, and relativist hegemony, an oppositional culture that remains prominent and significant in the United States, the dissident culture of traditionalists, by which Himmelfarb seems to mean those who continue to promote the Victorian values of self-discipline, self-help, family, civil society, sexual morality, patriotism, and religion or morality. She counterpoints these values to the values of the counterculturalists which, she argues, have given rise in late twentieth and early twentieth century America to increased divorce rates, increased crime rates, increased drug abuse rates, increased female headed families living in poverty rates, increased cohabitation rates, increased narcissism, and increases in a host of other immoralities.

As I noted, Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics have become standard jeremiad fare among intellectual conservatives like Himmelfarb and fellow travellers like Lynne Cheney, William Bennett, and Robert Bork. This world of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century polemics and apologetics, however, seems rather quaint, dainty, and passe in the age of that right wing demagogue who has dominated so much discourse in the early 21st century, Donald Trump. Trump, of course, is someone who has been married multiple times, committed adultery on several occasions, brags of his sexual strategies and conquests to friends and media celebrities, makes fun of the disabled, proffers crazy and delusional conspiracy theories, rages at hallucinated un-American traitors in his midst, fellow travels with racists and Nazis, and who is the supreme example of a flim flam capitalist narcissist. Trump, who is hardly the paragon of Victorian ethical and moral and virtue Himmelfarb preaches, surprised many of the punditariat by winning the presidency of the United States in 2016 and who has become, since his run for the presidency in 2016, the totem figure of a purification cult grounded in a variant of the American nationalist faith, a cult centred on Trump and which has, as one of its major statements of faith, the belief that their great leader is a man called by god or nature to "make America great again". Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics, in other words, echo an intellectual world that has, at least for the moment, passed just like the age of Victoria has passed.

There are a number of other problems with Himmelfarb's declensional polemic and apologetic. On the theoretical level she argues for a cultural determinism or reductionism that is ultimately similar to and as problematic as the economic determinism of vulgar Marxists. And while culture, which Himmelfarb emphasises, is important, so are economics (class, poverty, we have to eat), politics (status, humans, who have always lived in groups, have to live together), geography, and demography (age, cohort). Additionally, Himmelfarb fails to distinguish descriptive or empirical relativism from normative or ethical and moral relativism, a common demonising strategy used by many conservative and right wing polemicists and apologists or demagogues.

On the methodological level Himmelfarb seems to argue, on the one hand, that the hegemonic postmodernist culture of situational tolerance and its heirs and the dissident culture of "traditionalists", with which she identifies, are Weberian ideal types and that they intersect and interact in a variety of ways in practise. At the same time, Himmelfarb seems to view these two cultures (a riff on C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities?) as distinct or binary movements engaged in a manichean culture war for the very soul of America. Additionally, Himmelfarb utilises and mixes and matches both quantitative and qualitative anecdotal data, which sometimes makes her argument less compelling and convincing.

On the cultural level Himmelfarb conflates intellectual and popular culture. While the United States does have intellectual cultures, which take a variety of forms in their culture, their politics, and their economics, the US also has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and anti-academicism particularly on the right, a movement distinct from traditional liberalism or conservatism. Additionally, Himmelfarb, who sees religion as a bulwark of Victorian values, misses the increasing age, cohort, and cultural tensions within American intellectual evangelicalism at places like Calvin and Wheaton (Illinois) these days.

Speaking of the religious culture, Himmelfarb finds greater cultural and ideological coherence in right wing religion than there is. She fails, for example, to distinguish between conservative intellectual Christianity, such as that found at Calvin College, Wheaton College (Illinois), Brigham Young University, and the University of Notre Dame, separatist Protestantism, such as that at Bob Jones University, and mainstream right wing anti-intellectual Christianity, which preaches the anti-intellectual gospel of everyman a Bible scholar regardless of whether they know Hebrew, Aramaic, koine Greek, and Near Eastern history or not, the gospel of free market capitalism, something non-existent in biblical times, the gospel of Anglo-Saxonism, and the gospel of theocratic we are OK you are not OK intolerance.

On the geographic level HImmelfarb's claim that the US is one nation and two cultures is problematic. Joel Garreau (The Nine Nations of North America, 1981), for instance, argues that there are nine nations with varying cultures in North America while Edward Crabb and James Curtis (Regions Apart, 2005) argue that the United States and Canada are really four nations or societies with different cultures: the francophone and the anglophone in Canada and the North and the South in the United States. I would argue that there are at least two nations in the United States, the Northeast and Pacific Coast and the South, and that one can find elements of each in other parts of the US. Austin, for instance, is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than rural Texas. Salt Lake City is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than most of the other parts of Mormon Utah and the Mormon culture region save perhaps for St. George. The South continues to be characterised by strong elements of theocratic Christianity and White identity superiority while the Intermountain West, save for Mormondom, continues to be characterised, in part, by European post-imperialist racism and rebellion against the federal government, which owns substantial amount of real estate in the West, despite the fact that without government intervention, interventions in the form of things like the Boulder Dam, the West would be a very different place.

Personally, I think one can make a compelling argument that there may be more than only two Americas. The American sports world, which can serve as an excellent transparent mirror into American culture and society, is tribal. It's the Dallas Cowboys and their worshipful fans versus the New York Giants and their devoted fans, the New York Yankees and their devoted fans versus the Boston Red Sox and their worshipful fans, the Chicago Bulls and their worshipful fans versus the Los Angeles Lakers and their devoted fans. The US, this sports tribalism suggests, is a land of tribes where national teams, like the US men's and women's soccer teams, are barely a blip on the national radar. It is, of course, different in other parts of the world. New Zealand, for instance, worships its national rugby team, which is central to Kiwi civic religion. Canada worships its national hockey team, a sport central to its public religion. Brasil worships its national football or soccer team, which is central to its civil religion. Generally speaking, one finds, in nations where a national sport is prominent and central, a greater sense of national identity, though there are interesting caveats here. In the US, for instance, the coding of the military and the police as sacred and the myths associated with them play an important role in the conceptualisation of national identity among right wing groups.

On the educational level Himmelfarb treats academia as too consensual. As several surveys have shown over the years there are a number of significant cultural and ideological differences between academics in the hard sciences, the social sciences, humanities, those who teach law, those who teach the medical sciences, and those who teach in other of the applied sciences. Social scientists and those in the humanities seem to best fit Himmerfarb's caricature and stereotype of the "typical" academic.

On the political level Himmelfarb makes the common mistake that the United States is a democracy. Even if one accepts the notion that the US is a republic the reality is that America is, like all core modern and postmodern societies, bureaucratic. As Weber and Michels noted in the early twentieth century, all modern and postmodern bureaucracies are pyramidal in form with structured and inherent inequalities of power, authority, and wealth embedded and institutionalised in them (See GE, Apple, Kroger's, the government of the American state of Indiana). And while one might argue that these structured inequalities are grounded in merit, one of the central myths of British settler societies, the realities of nepotism and structured inequalities related to social and cultural capital, suggest that merit is, at best, only partially at play in American economics, politics, and culture. So, if one is going to argue that the US is a democracy the person or persons making this argument need to provide empirical evidence as to why a society characterised by bureaucracies with embedded structural inequalities and impacted by favouritism are democratic. Personally, I don't think anyone can do this because the US is, by definition and as a consequence of its bureaucracies, an oligarchy and always has been.

Another political level problem one finds in One Nation, Two Cultures is Himmelfarb's failure to distinguish, as I noted earlier, intellectual conservatism from right wing political culture. These two cultures, and subcultural and countercultural variants within each, are different and distinct though there is overlap on some issues. Conservatives, historically speaking, have their origins in the intellectual opposition to the Enlightenment and particularly the French Revolution though one might argue that foreshadowings of it appear in the defenders of the monarchical faith. The right, on the other hand, has its origins in religion, anti-intellectualism, and a culture of white superiority. Both may preach the gospel of the free market but that doesn't mean that they have the same historical origins and that they are the same culturally and ideologically. As for Himmelfarb's conservatism, it is actually old Enlightenment liberalism, the liberalism of Adam Smith, the liberalism, if somewhat tensely, of John Stuart Mill, and the liberalism that was shocked by the French Revolution. 

On the social ethical level Himmelfarb is a bit confusing. Is Himmelfab arguing that counterculturalists have a situational morality, or does she maintain that the counterculturalists have no real ethics or morality at all? Can Himmelfarb admit that some elements of the "counterculture" have as ethically valid and thought out conception of the public sphere and of virtue, a virtue tied to human rights, as conservatives and right wingers? It seems to me that Himmelfarb wants to have it both ways, that she wants to have her cake--yes they do have an ethics and a morality--and not eat it too--no they don't have a social ethics and morality beyond a selective situational ethics and morality, which may be no ethics or morality at all.

Postscript: I am proud to say that this review was banned by Amazon for possibly violating "community standards" though how it violated I don't know because whoever categorised it as such--amateur suits, fundamentalist bots, politically correct ideologues--don't tell you how said review may, and they do use the word may, violates community standards. Whatever the reason it was banned and a censored version was requested, it is clear that autocratic and despotic Amazon is not committed to real freedom of speech and that says it all.

The Books of My Life: Who Killed Canadian History?

Though a number of commentators have traced the history of the history wars back to the mid- to late 1960s and made the sixties either the hero or villain of the piece, depending on the ideological perspective of the polemicist or apologist writing the tale of the history war, battles over history--who tells it, how it is told, and the stories it tells--go back much further in human history than the 1960s. Polemics and apologetics, in fact, have been a central part of the writing of history for as long as there has been "history".

The historically oriented books of the Tanakh, for instance, and particularly the historically oriented books of the Torah, tell the inherently polemical and apologetic story of god's chosen people and their trials and travails as they tried to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh at Mount Sinai, the site of the covenant in the Yahwist and Priestly versions of the tale of the chosen people in the Torah, or Mount Horeb, the site of the covenant in Elohist and Deuteronomist retellings of the sacred story. Israel's prophets, the nevi'im offered polemical and apologetic commentary, a kind of midrash before midrash, on these sacred texts pointing out the failures of the chosen to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh or Elohim and the punishment the lord or god brought to bear on his chosen as a consequence of their failures to live up to the covenant. Ancient Egyptian texts polemicised about the greatness of their civilisation, a greatness that demanded that battles lost to the Hittites be rewritten as victories. The "histories" of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans are filled with examples of polemics and apologetics over hubris, barbarians, Socrates, Alkibiades, particular emperors, such as Nero or Justinian, or particular empresses, such as Theodora.

Polemics and apologetics didn't end with the advent of professionalised history and professional historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both can still be found on the surfaces and in the deep structures of contemporary historical writing despite claims by many professional historians that history has become, with them, empirical and objective or, at least, dispassionate. Professional historians of American Christianity, for instance, wrote empirically grounded histories of particular Christian denominations grounded in primary source material that were undergirded with polemical and apologetic assumptions and presumptions that Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, and even more particularly American Protestant Christianity, was god's one true religion and that the denomination they wrote their histories on and about was god's true Christianity. 

Professional historians have, over the years, fought a variety of polemical and apologetic battles. They have battled over whether history should be--note the normative phrasing here--narrative in form, whether it ought to be methodologically sensitive incorporating quantitative methods into what has largely been a qualitatively oriented discipline, and whether historians should be theoretically literate. Many professional historians, for instance, reacted negatively to Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States when it was published in 1913 finding it too theoretically oriented and too reductionist. One invariably wonders if some of this unease with Beard's book was due to the fact that Beard's book de-mythologised an American sacred text and, in the process, demythologised American sacred history. Some have reacted negatively to the theoretical and methodological approach of the French Annales school of history, a historical school that goes back at least to the late 1920s. Several of the Annales historians argue that history should be quantitative, qualitative, and theoretical, contending that history must be understood as made or caused by both long term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, such as the great power struggles that led up to the Great War, great power struggles that go back hundreds of years, and short term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic events. such as the assassination of an Austrian-Hungarian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. Many historians find the Annales approach too theoretical, far too focused on economic events, far too quantitative in orientation, and too far removed from the traditional great events and great men approach, arguably a somewhat secularised version of the Christian lives of saints and the mode of history writing that has dominated history in both its "amateur" and "professional" forms for some time.

Others, a minority of historians like myself, a historian deeply impacted by cultural anthropology and sociology, have long found the Annales approach to history quite compelling. In fact I would argue that the Annales approach to human history best helps us understand and comprehend the culture wars and the battles over history that have often reared their heads throughout human history and have been particularly prominent since the 1960s. When we apply the Annales approach to the culture wars it is clear that the culture wars and the culture wars over history have been going on in the West, as I noted earlier, for centuries, the longue duree, and we can see that the culture wars are also stimulated simultaneously by specific events, such as the impact of renewed social and cultural history on the historical profession after the 1960s. Recently, there has been a lot of ink spilled over the history battles that erupted out of the countercultural 1960s. At the heart of these battles over history are the same questions that have troubled historians for years. Should history be mythic-empirical? Should it be objective-empirical? Should it be hermeneutic-empirical? Should it be narrative in form or quantitatively grounded? 

One of the most prominent polemicists and apologists fighting the post-1960s culture war over Canadian history has been the retired York University historian, former member of the Royal Military College Board of Governors, former Chair of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century, and former head of the Canadian War Museum J.L. Granatstein (sometimes aided and abetted in his culture war by fellow historian David Bercuson and others of a cult of militarism that seems aristocratic in nature). Granatstein, who has written extensively on the Canadian military and Canadian foreign policy has engaged in polemics and apologetics on at least two different levels. On one polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has advocated for the transformation of Canada from a peacekeeper nation to, what Ian McKay and Jamie Strong call, in a nice turn of phrase, a warrior nation in order to protect Canada's interests. That this Canadian warrior nation is likely to be little more than a player sitting on the American junior varsity imperial bench along with England and Australia seems to be acceptable to Granatstein. How a Canadian nation that is small in population and next door to the, by far, dominant superpower of the post-Cold War world, an imperial power that dominates Canada economically, politically, and culturally and hence doomed to be, in the foreseeable future, a junior partner on the American imperial team is going to protect its "national interests" (read elite interests) which are intimately tied to American interests (read elite interests) is beyond me, however. Perhaps they don't have a problem with Canada taking care of the gatorade and the dirty laundry for the Team America.

On another polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has waded into the polemics and apologetics surrounding the rise of a "new" Canadian history, a "new" Canadian history dominated, he claims, by social and cultural history and by quantitative and hermeneutic methodologies and approaches. In his provocatively titled monograph Who Killed Canadian History (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1999 and Toronto: Harper Perennial, revised and expanded edition, 2007) Granatstein argues, much as did Australian historian Keith Windschuttle before him in his equally provocatively titled The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Sydney: Macleay, 1994), that the counterculture of the 1960s gave rise to a social and cultural history that is killing, murdering, and savaging traditional and national Canadian (or in Windschuttle's case Australian) traditional great man and great events political history. The social and cultural historians who came of age in the economic, political, cultural, and demographic ferment of the 1960s in Western Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, have, Granatstein argues, replaced the history of the state, politics, foreign policy, and wars with the history of common men, women, and ethnics, a history that is, Granatstein claims, far too focused on historical trivialities, something that has often been a problem in a discipline that has often avoided and demonised theory and methodology and hence, questions related to historical significance. 

Granatstein also argues that this "new" once countercultural and now dominant history has negatively impacted Canada beyond the academy. These "new" histories, Granatstein argues, have linked up with progressive educational reforms afoot throughout Canada in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, educational reforms that emphasised the need for education for individual and identity group self esteem. This has resulted, Granatstein argues, in a history that celebrates the achievements of identity groups like women and selective ethnic groups. Combined with the limited mandates for history courses in Canada's primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions, the "new" histories and the "new" historians, Granatstein contends, are undermining Canadian national identity, something that is essential if the Canadian nation is, claims Granatstein, to survive and thrive as a common culture.

Granatstein's argument that the lack of a common history resulting from acids associated with the "new" social and cultural histories along with post-World War II battles between the Canadian federal government and the provinces over power and authority (as I write Alberta is set to institute a policy which would allow the political elites of that province to effectively check what comes out of Ottawa and check any challenges to that power in the courts), is grounded, whether consciously or unconsciously, in theoretical perspectives that go back at least to the European Enlightenment and the Romantic era and to the Enlightenment philosophe and romantic social and cultural theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the founding father of sociology and ethnology, Emile Durkheim. Rousseau and Durkheim, more analytically, argued, as does Granatstein and others before and after him, that for a nation to effectively function as a nation and survive as a nation, it must have a common culture and a common set of values and norms. There is, of course, a lot of truth to this perspective though this approach raises a question Granatstein barely if at all addresses, namely whether Canada with its two and perhaps now three, four, five, or ten solitudes, has ever been a single nation and has ever had a common national culture, questions that can equally be posed about the United States with its at least two founding solitudes, that of the North and that of the South.

There are a number of other empirical, methodological, and theoretical issues one could bring to bear on Granatstein's polemic against the "new" social history and cultural history and their postmodernist impact on modernist history. Granatstein, for instance, does not, in his rather too broad brushstrokes, distinguish between various types of academics inside Canada's ivory towers. As numerous surveys have shown over the years, those who teach in the professions, in the hard sciences, and in the applied sciences are not the same culturally as those who teach in the social sciences and humanities. Those who teach in the social sciences and humanities are closer to the caricatures and stereotypes Granatstein plays in in Who Killed Canadian History. Additionally, Granatstein ignores, to some extent, the impact the old analogue media and the new digital media have had on academic history textbooks. When I was an undergraduate, for instance, I had to read thirteen books for an introductory class on Greek history, texts that would not be considered textbooks today. Today a teacher is lucky if she or he can get her or his students to read the one brief textbook generally assigned for introductory courses today. Publishers, of course, have tried to sex up textbooks to get professors to assign them for classes and that, they hope, will move students to read them. They have added a host of colour photos, a host of topical elements, a host of anecdotal introductions that mimic film and television narratives, and a host of graphs, maps, and charts that they hope will stimulate and generate student engagement with the textbook. I have, however, have seen no evidence that this publishing strategy is working. What this strategy has done is to raise the cost of textbooks to astronomical levels, price levels that not all students can afford.

Some of the elements added to modern postmodern textbooks, of course, are related to gender, ethnicity, and class, all phenomena that have been prominent and significant factors in the making of history over the centuries and all things the "new" historians focus on and should--yes I am going normative here--focus on. Granatstein and his colleagues have qualms about this increasing focus on gender, ethnicity, and class, because, as I noted, they think they are pushing much needed political, diplomatic, legal, and military history out of history textbooks and out of history classes alienating students from history courses in the process. According to Granatstein students are still interested in these "traditional" subareas of the historical profession. He cites somewhat anecdotal data--student interest and attendance in courses in these areas--to make his case. But is this really the case? Is this anecdotal evidence sufficient to prove the point? Shouldn't historians (not to mention publishers) be engaging in ethnography to find out what really interests students? Beyond these, hasn't the old great men and great events history proven to be as if not more "boring" to many contemporary history students?

Speaking of university textbooks, I perused several introductory texts on Canadian history chosen somewhat randomly while reading through Who Killed Canadian History in order to test them against Granatstein's hypotheses. What I have found suggests that Granatstein overstates his case about the decline of traditional history and its replacement by trivial history and vanity history, both things that history has long been anyway and something that should not be surprising given that Granatstein is, after all, engaging in polemics and apologetics. In the 529 page Canada: Unity in Disunity by Paul Cornell, Jean Hamelin, Fernand Ouellet, and Marcel Trudel, a textbook that early on tried to deal with the realities of Canadian multiculturalism and pluralism, there are 19 references to John Macdonald, 10 pages on World War I, and 21 pages on World War II. In the 537 page second edition of the introductory textbook Destinies: Canadian History Since Confederation written by R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald Smith and  published in 1996, three years before the first edition of Who Killed Canadian History,  23 pages are devoted to the Great War while there are 50 references to John Macdonald. The 568 page 2003 edition of the single volume Canada: a National History by Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, both of whom Granatstein brands as killers of Canadian history, devotes 19 pages to World War II, including brief sections on the air and sea war between 1939 and 1944, while Pierre Trudeau garners 5 references and the Charter 1. By way of comparison, the 567 page Nation: Canada Since Confederation, the 1990 textbook written by Granatstein himself along with Irving Abella, T.W. Acheson, David Bercuson, R. Craig Brown, and H. Blair Neatby, a textbook that is no longer in print, devotes 67 pages to the period from 1911 to 1919,  54 pages to the period from 1939 to 1957, references Macdonald 10 times, Trudeau 21 times, and the Charter once. While Nation has chapters on industrialisation, labour radicalism, and immigration, the bulk of the textbook is devoted to political history raising the question of how serious "traditional" historians like Granatstein are in advocating for an integrated political and social and cultural history in introductory classes and texts, particularly since the Francis, Jones, and Smith and Conrad and Finkel do integrate "traditional" and "new" histories.

I found Who Killed Canadian History in both of its editions--they do differ from each other as the revised and expanded edition adds a couple of chapters and some parts of the text have been deleted and other material added to the text in the second edition--an interesting if not fully compelling polemic on how Canadian history and history in general should be done. I agree with some aspects of Who Killed Canadian History, such as the need for politics to be a central part of introductory courses and introductory textbooks on Canadian history. But so should historical approaches that emphasise economics, culture (gender, ethnicity, class), demography, and geography, all significant and important forces that impact human beings and the worlds humans have created and all of which are essential frames through which we can understand the human species from prehistory to today. As for who might be interested in Grantstein's polemic, it is likely to be of interest to those interested in polemics and apologetics over how to do history and to those interested in cultural divisions within the humanities and the social sciences in contemporary Canadian universities, itself an iteration of the broader Western culture wars that have long impacted human history and human culture, particularly in the core nation world.

  

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Firefly and Political and Ideological Correctness

 

There is so much bullshite out there in the brave new digital cyber world that one really doesn't know where to begin in exploring it. Recently, there has been a lot of talk about a potential reboot of Joss Whedon's and Tim Minnear's short lived cult television show Firefly by Disney. Disney, who now owns the show itself and apparently wants it to run on their Disney+ platform, and which, perhaps even more importantly, at least for the corporations that dominate the modern and postmodern core nation world, owns the intellectual property rights associated with the show, things like books, model spaceships, comic books, McDonald's happy meal tie-ins, and bobblehead dolls, and has wet dreams about the monies they can make from both.

Firefly, as its legions of its fans, the self proclaimed Browncoats, know died almost before the show ever got off the ground thanks to interference from and a lack of patience amongst the executives at Fox, the network that broadcast Firefly between 2002 and 2003. Fox executives apparently thought they knew better about how the show should get made than did the successful show runners and writers who actually wrote it and produced it. Fox executives, for instance, demanded another pilot episode, finding the two part "Serenity", which was supposed to be the first episode, too lacking in action content despite the fact that there are more than enough action sequences in that episode. Apparently, Fox executives can no longer comprehend a narrative world that unfolds and is heavily character centred in their brave new world of adolescent comic book Hollywood movies with little plot and lots of special effects and make the pilgrimage to see them upon their release. Presumably these films with their multiple cliffhangers provide the next best thing to an orgasm for the fanboys and fangirls who go to seem them about every fifteen minutes. Additionally, Fox showed episodes out of order making a hash of at least some of the narrative arcs and character arcs built into the show.

Most commentators get this woeful tragi-comic tale right, something that isn't that difficult given extensive interviews with those who created, ran, and made Firefly. There are other aspects of Firefly, however, where the so-called critics who dominate the world of cyberverse television and film "criticism" seem to be writing about a show that isn't the real Firefly that was actually broadcast on Fox in 2002 and 2003. Take the "critic" who calls him or her self Faefyx Collington (a nom de plume?). Collington, like many others in the cyber world of television and film criticism, is yet another one of those critics who actually think they could make a better Firefly than those who actually made it. Collington, for instance, in her ScreenRant essay on the possible Disney reboot of 5 July 2001 ("How a Modern Reboot Could Work"), argues that one of the best things about a possible reboot would be the ability of those making the new Firefly to fix the politically and ideologically incorrect aspects of the old Firefly. According to Collington one of the main "mistakes", as she calls it, of the who made the show was to make it an apologia and polemic for Southern states rights and, by extension, Southern slavery. Another "mistake" or problem with Firefly was, according to Collington, its lack of Chinese characters in the show despite the implications of the show that China, or at least China in alliance with the 'West" is the Alliance. Representation, you see, is an obsession with some "critics", particularly in the academic world, who seem to think that equal (if not selective demographic) representaion is essential if the progressive world they imagine and code as good is to come about.

There are a number of problems with this approach beyond the one in which a critic, who, as far as I know, has never made television beyond YouTube and others of its ilk, thinks he or she can make better television show than those who actually make it. Another problem with the polemics of those like Collington is the fact that Firefly isn't a tale about the US Civil War despite the fact that it is a loose adaptation of a book of fiction that is about the Civil War, Michael Shaara's Killer Angels (1974), a book that Whedon read while on a trip to London and led him to wonder about what happened to the losers in war. War thus isn't the dominant theme in Firefly. Nor is state's rights. Rather the dominant focus of Firefly is what happens to the losers in war. Firefly, in other words, is about the losers--Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Jayne, Simon, River, and Book--who band together for various reasons out in the Black so to eke out a living on the edges of the populated universe in order to escape the smothering, stifling, and morally questionable Alliance and its corporate ally or master, Blue Sun, which is helping the government create a cadre of true believing assassins that will help them rule their shiny high tech empire and keep it safe from those who might challenge it. One of the main metaphors, if not the main metaphor the show explores, is the difference between the rich core planets of the Alliance, a metaphor for the rich core nations of the world, and those spaces and planets on the arse end of the galaxy, which are metaphors for the poor peripheral and exploited nations and countries of the modern and postmodern world. As for slavery, Firefly condemns it several times, most clearly in the episode "Shindig". And as for representational issues, a lack in Firefly, an unfolding text, is not necessarily absence (unless critics are omniscient and I don't know it) even out in a Black populated by the poor and outcasts, including political outcasts.

Why do some critics prefer their simulated Firefly to the real Firefly? A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that humans, by and large, socially and culturally construct their realities. The realities they construct, not surprisingly, reflect their utopian visions (more prominent among those on the left) or dystopian visions (more prominent among conservatives, critics of the Enlightenment, and the multitude of populist know nothings). As is well known from social scientific experiments, political and ideological correctness (a cultural phenomenon that characterises most political, economic, and cultural parties and movements particularly of a religious nature including nationalism) has been known to override and overdetermine what is actually there on the "page" or in the "text". And it is such creative readings of "texts" that makes the homiletical criticism of critics like Collington problematic.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Social and Cultural Construction of Reality

For those interested in exploring how humans construct their realities both socially and culturally, YouTube reaction videos are a gold mine. These reaction videos allow empirical researchers a means by which they can peer into the minds of those who construct alternative "realities" for themselves and, by doing so, can help scholars understand how the social and cultural construction of reality works in real life. 

I recently watched a YouTube reactor react to the tragic, sometimes shit happens, death of Tara in the season six episode of Buffy entitled "Seeing Red". The reactor to this episode and to season six of Buffy whinged over the course of his fifteen minute video about how the death of Tara was yet another example of the dead lesbian cliche in Western films and television, a cliche that admittedly has been prominent allegorically, metaphorically, and, more recently, literally in American television and beyond, and about how season six of Buffy undermined everything Buffy had done up to that point. The evidence he offered for this assertion? The magic which Tara and her girlfriend Willow is coded as a metaphor for sex and once Tara and Willow reconcile after their breakup from earlier in season six, they have sex and almost immediately afterwards Tara is shot and killed by Warren. Dead lesbian. Dead lesbian cliche. Case, or so our reactor concludes, closed.

There are, of course, problems with this argument as anyone who has ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer closely knows. Magic was coded in a number of ways in Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the course of its television run. The magic of Amy's mother in the season one episode "Cheerleader", for instance, is coded as negative and as a metaphor of parents sucking the life out of their children who they are convinced are not living up to the potential they have for them. The magic performed by Amy at the behest of Xander in season two's "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered", a magic that is ostensibly supposed to make Cordelia reconcile with the Xandman after she dumped him so he can break up with her, is coded as humorous and potentially dangerous for, to paraphrase Buffy's Watcher Giles, love, or more accurately obsession, can lead to jealousy and jealousy can lead to verbal and physical violence. Romanticism, history seems to tell us, has, in fact, probably killed and maimed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. Other instances of magic as both humorous  and potentially dangerous include Willow's use of magic to try to forget Oz, Willow's boyfriend who has left her and Sunnydale after a complication in their relationship in the fourth season episode "Something Blue". The magic performed by Willow to restore Angel's lost soul in season two's finale "Becoming" is coded as positive, as a ritual act that honours the memory of Angelus's victim Jenny Calendar, the computer science teacher Buffy's watcher Giles fell in love with, who was killed after using the computer to reconstruct the the spell that would restore Angel's soul, and as a good thing because it restores Angel's soul, if, tragically, a bit to late. Tara's undermining of a spell she and Willow cast in the season four episode "Goodbye Iowa" in order to find the new big bad Adam, is coded as mysterious and we don't learn the reason for Tara's action until the early fifth season episode "Family".

It is true that Buffy did also code magic, in much of season four and season five as a marker of lesbian attraction, specifically for the mutual attraction of Tara and Willow, and for lesbian sex, specifically the lesbian sex between Tara and Willow. Given the fear that the studios that made American television shows like Buffy had, after the demise of the sitcom Ellen in the wake of the main character's coming out on that show, a demise some network executives appear to have attributed to Ellen's coming out, the portrayal of lesbian attraction and lesbian sex had to be lightly danced around on commercial American television for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Buffy certainly danced around lesbian attraction and sex via its use of magic as a metaphor or an analogy for sexual attraction and lesbian sex between Tara and Willow beginning with the fourth season episode "Hush". This was hardly the only metaphorical or analogical use of magic in those seasons, however. Magic was also used as a metaphor and analogy for addiction and particularly Willow's addiction to magic during those years, an addiction that becomes clear clear--though it may have precedents in retrospect--in season four's "Something Blue", the episode that directly precedes "Hush", the episode in which Tara and Willow meet for the first time and an episode in which the sexual frisson between the two of them explodes off the small screen.

Given this evidence, in order to make the argument that magic is a metaphor for sex and that Tara is killed because she had sex with Willow just prior to her murder at the hands of Warren, one has to ignore not only the fact that the sex Tara and Willow have before Tara's death is literal, but one has to ignore the various ways that magic has been coded over the course of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1997 to 2003. In the world of scholarship such an approach in order to be compelling must, if the hypothesis is to be at all compelling, tell us how and why the other ways magic has been coded in Buffy are irrelevant to the accidental death of Tara in "Seeing Red". Unfortunately, this is not the approach our YouTube reactor and others like him, including many fan scholars and scholar fans, take. But then, given the empirical evidence it is an approach they do not and probably can not take. What they, including our YouTube reactor, can and often do instead is to simply ignore any evidence that conflicts with their "opinion" dismissing and coding that which does not concur with their "opinion" as simply an "opinion". The problem, a problem that should jump out at anyone which prefers their analysis empirical rather than politically and ideologically correct, is that magic has, factually speaking, been coded in several ways in the Buffyverse and this fact has bearing on Tara's murder in "Seeing Red". The fact that many simply dismiss such empirical evidence as "opinion" gives us a peek into how contemporary socialisation works and how the social and cultural construction of reality works to construct alternative cultural and ideological universes that appear to be impervious to empirical reality. And so it goes.
 

PT Barnum Was Wrong, A Sucker Isn't Born Every Minute, a Sucker is Born Every Second: On the Conspracy Theory Flim Flam Trail

I was watching France 24 News yesterday and I was intrigued by a report on that network by a journalist whose job it is to monitor social media sites for disinformation and fake news for France 24, an admirable if an often if not generally ineffectual enterprise given the realities of the social and cultural construction of reality and the workings of cognitive dissonance in human beings. Of course, the manipulation of information by "public" and "private" entities is as old as large scale agricultural civilisation themselves, the very civilisations in which writing, a new conmunication form, arose and developed, often taking the form of "sacred" texts. In such societies and cultures monarchs claimed, for instance, to be related to the gods in some way, shape, or form and claimed that their relationship to the gods gave them the divine right to rule and, of course, expropriate the peasants in the process. The courtiers of the monarch often conveyed this religion of divine right to the peasant masses via oral and eventually written forms of communication, and many of the peasants to who such propaganda was conveyed, one assumes--assumes because peasants have only rarely left their thoughts on the subject to posterity in the form of written documents--believed the hype.

Conspiracy theories have taken many forms since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in China, India, and the Near East. The Judaic, Christian, and Muslim religions of the Meditteranean are, for instance, chock full of conspiracy theories about, for example, the end times and conspiracies related to the final apocalypse. The Christian Bible's book of Revelation or the Apocalypse, for example, claims that the Roman Emperor Nero, who it refers to as the Beast, 666, or 616, is a major player in an anti-Christian conspiracy that will ultimately bring about the second coming of the Christian messiah and the restoration of a Christian theocratic utopia. Given, the geographical and cultural impact of Christianity and Islam these conspiracy theories have left their mark on the cultures, high, middle, and low, that arose out of them in the various geographies they dominated culturally and politically. They are still with us today, for instance, in European settler societies like the United States, Canada, and Australia, all the children, in some way, shape, or form, of a Christian culture in which conspiracy theories are central.

Recently, a number of climate and weather conspiracy theories have become prominent in particular countercultures and subcultures in the West and particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia. In the report I watched on France 24 that I referred to earlier, the journalist debunked the accuracy of a YouTube video--YouTube is one of the central communication platforms in the brave new digital world--which purported to show governmental weather making machines which were devised to create weather havoc across the world and particularly in the United States and Australia. She showed quite clearly that those demagoging for this conspiracy theory used a YouTube video that was totally unrelated to the claim that governments were manipulating the weather for fun, power, and profit. But then factual accuracy has never been at the top of the to do list of demagogues, apologists, and polemicists.

I was and am familiar with the chemtrails conspiracy theory, a theory which claims that aeroplane chemical trails are attempts by governments to manipulate the weather, a theory which would require at least some governments, like that of the US, for example, to be in league with major corporations since chemtrails are left by private airlines as well as American military aerocraft, I was not familiar with the variant of the chemtrails conspiracy theory that was the focus of the report on France 24, a conspiracy theory that suggested that giant electrical towers were and are weather making machines that are causing all sorts of climate havoc across the world, well at least the core nation world, including hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina, the hurricane that devastated the American Louisiana and Mississippi coasts in 2005, and massive rainfalls, like those that led recently to massive flooding in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria in Australia.

As several scholars have noted, the best propaganda, the best socialisation for conformity, the most effective bullshite, contains at least some truth amidst the fiction or bullshite in it. That is certainly the case here. The "public" sector and the "private" sector have, as social scientists have long known, been trying, with some success, to manipulate the weather for some time as water witching and cloud seeding, which dates back to the 19th century, shows. It is quite a hop, skip, and a jump from technological efforts like that of the Chinese to lower pollution levels in Beijing to the US government making hurricanes to devastate parts of the US to expand their control of the population and enrich the petroleum industry, something the US already does in the form of subsidies to an oil industry that recently made billions in profits making one wonder why further subsidies are needed, to a full blown conspiracy in which governments and their corporate fellow travellers are creating hurricanes, tornados, droughts, droughts in areas that are already arid and which wouldn't have the populations and human made landscapes they do have without government subsidies for things like dams and reservoirs, something one assumes even these negative nabobs of nutty conspiracy theories would see as a positive even if they don't know the role of governments in making the settlement of arid areas in the core nation world possible. 

We shouldn't, of course, be surprised about such hop, skip, and jump flights of delusional fantasy. Self-proclaimed Christians have been hop, skipping, and jumping to their conspiracy laden predictions of the end of the world and the second coming of Christ since at least the first century CE. Nor should we be surprised that the people who believe in a lot of these conspiracy theories and create realities that reflect these conspiracy theories think they are living a movie and that life is like a movie. They think they are good James Bond's--ironically a govenment agent from the deep state--fighting evil incarnate in the form of SMERSH or SPECTRE who now run the govenment. They think, in other words, that life is like a manichean piece of fiction and they are the good guys fighting the totally evil bad guys in a cosmic drama that will determine the fate of the universe. In the end, P.T. Barnum is both right and wrong. Suckers are born constantly, but they are born constantly every second rather than every minute.
 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Social Media in an Age of Narcissism and Anti-Intellectualism

In Alfred Hitchcock's superb film Rear Window a broken legged Jimmy Stewart who is stuck in a cast because of an accident he suffered while photographing a car race, sits in his wheelchair and stares at the windows (metaphorical cinema screens) across his quardrangle. As he, Scotty, gazes again and again at the windows across his courtyard he begins to do what we humans often do. He begins to construct stories--whether they are real or unreal we are unsure at first and even to some extent at the end of the movie--about the people and the situations they have gotten themselves into behind each of those rear windows. Today, the voyeuristic and narrative ("reality") constructing society Hitchcock explored in Rear Window dominates digital media sites like YouTube. On digital platforms like YouTube voyeurs voyeur and those being voyeured act out--whether in deep acting mode or surface acting mode is sometimes unclear--various scenes from their own movie about their own "real life" hoping, in the process, that by allowing voyeurs to voyeur them they can earn the crumbs (and to find perhaps simultaneously an online community of the like minded) offered by our new digital bosses (much the same as the old bosses) thanks to the "reactions" they put up for all the voyeuring "public" to see. 

Much of what these voyeur mes put up on their social media pages is almost as old as humankind itself. Sensationalists like Inside of You Clips and Sarah Z sensationalise for fun and (California dreaming) profits. Demagogues like Milo Yiannopoulos demagogue about the political, ideological, and cultural things that have proven to be successful in manipulating the gullible masses. Some of them are presumably even congnisant of the fact that they are playing a game. Those demagogued follow along after their cultural masters repeating the apologetic and polemical mantras their pied pipers have loudly whispered into their ears. Whingers and whiners, like Books and BlueStockings, spew emotional hatred and ad hominems at, for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon, with little of anything empirical, systematic, analytical, or substantive in their rants. In fact, posters like Books and BlueStockings foreground the empirical fact that many if not most of these voyeur mes have not grasped the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder. Even many of the posts that are actually grounded, if limitedly, in empirical facts end up being, as is the case, for example, with posts by Ronnie Bradley on Buffy, limitedly empirical, selectively empirical, and ultimately overdetermined by ideology and political correctness, making such posts more polemical than empirical and analytical. Decently done if limitedly exegetical reaction posts by those of SofieReacts, the LexiCrowd Thor, and Andy and Alex, though grounded in textual rather than political and ideological correct analysis, evince little understanding of the broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, geographic, and historical contexts of that to which they are reacting, approaches that make many YouTube reactions variants of fundamentalist textual literalism. In the end, so much of what is on social media sites like YouTube suggests very strongly that social media sites are the real vast wastelands of the core nation world, wastelands with only thin and microscopic intellectual oases (I am thinking here of the wonderful Fil from Wings of Pegasus, the amazing Clever Dick and his superb Doctor Who histories, Overthink Podcast, and others like them who do research and preparation for their videos) lying in the interstices of its vast intellectual deserts.