The Books of My Life: Warrior Nation

I came of intellectual age during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. I came of age, in other words, in an era in which reasonable and rational skepticism about what "authorities" said became more common and prominent than it had been in the 1950s, an era, at least on the surface, of enforced conformity. It was my friend John Cirillo (sic) who taught me of the need to be skeptical of what politicians said about things such as civil rights, about the war in Vietnam, and about the Watergate burglary. It was thanks to John that I came to realise that a lot of what demagogues, be they politicians or capitalist flim flam men, said, at least in public, was, empirically speaking, little more than--pardon my English--mythhistorical bullshite. 

I wasn't until I went to university that I learned that any analysis worth its salt had to be both critical and skeptical and grounded in the empirical record. At university I was treated to a more empirically and fact based history of the United States, Canada, Australia, and the world than I got in junior and senior high school. It was also at university I realised that much of what I was taught about American history and geography in junior and senior high, such, as, for instance, that it was evil Spain that forced America to go to war in the late nineteenth century to protect American honour and Cuban womanhood, was in large measure myth and, in large measure, bullshite propagated and perpetrated by demagogues allied with imperialist politicians and associated with the yellow journalism of the Hearst newspaper conglomerate. 

As a consequence of my university education it became apparent to me that while many believed that it was, for example, the economy or money that made the world go around, it was really ideology, ways of seeing or perceiving, ways of seeing, that underlay and undergirded notions that it was money made the world go around that really made the world go around. I learned, in other words, that it was socially and and culturally constructed ideologies that mediated "realities" for most humans and which created "reality" for most humans. 

At first, as I recall, I thought higher education might be the much needed cure for mythhistorical bulllshite. It soon became clear to me, however, that the bullshite people are socialised into and enculturated into and indoctrinated with makes the human world go around and that it was difficult if not impossible to counter what humans take on faith because they generally don't recognise that what they have faith in is created through a process of fetishisation, a process in which the parochial and particular are transformed into the universal. 

It is, of course, through socialisation and enculturation that common identities, including a common national identity, and a common culture, including a common national culture, are manufactured and continually remanufactured. As Emile Durkheim noted in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), culture creates and recreates, with the help of notions of fictive kinship and a common set of myths, symbol, icons, rituals, a common identity and a common sense of community whether on the tribal, clan, or national level. 

It is collective national identity that is the focus of Ian McKay's and Jamie Swift's superb Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), McKay and Swift take an ideal type approach to the history of Canadian identity and the culture wars over Canadian identity ever since Canada achieved "independence" from Great Britain in 1867. Despite dominion status and Canadian confederation in 1867, English Canadian culture, English Canadian identity, and English Canadian nationhood, McKay and Swift argue, remained closely tied to imperial British identity and culture. Nicely utilising an approach that melds biography with broader historical and cultural contexts McKay and Swift note that the British imperialist, writer, politician, and Governor-General of Canada John Buchan and the Canadian born adventurer William Stairs, who thought of himself as British and Canadian even when in the employ of the genocidal Leopold II of Belgium, were, embedded in an ethnocentric Victorian and Edwardian British imperial culture that celebrated adventure, exploration, British imperialism and the British White man's burden. This Victorian and Edwardian British culture socialised youth into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of imperialism, adventure, and exploration through material culture like the The Boy's Own Annual. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian White or Northern European sense of racial superiority. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of Christian superiority. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture that preached the superiority of British civilisation. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of manhood tied to gentlemanly sports and gentlemanly explorations of the world's various dark continents. Sports, adventuring, colonisation, and war, many were taught and came to believe, made the man, made the real man. 

This British imperial Canadian culture, as McKay and Swift point out, continues to be significant in English Canada, particularly among Canada's Anglo-Saxons. It was not the only Canadian identity culture, however. In the wake of World War II, a war during which Canadians became more conscious of their own identity and their own culture, an identity and culture that was distinct, at least ideologically, from that of Great Britain. As a result a somewhat new Canadian culture arose and became dominant. This new Canadian culture, McKay and Swift argue, was intimately tied to multiculturalism, to pluralism, to peacekeeping, to diplomacy, and to war, the last, at, least rhetorically, as a final option. This new Canadian identity and culture was homologous with the replacement of Great Britain as the dominant global great power by the United States, by increasing economic and cultural ties between Canada and United States, and by Canada's increasing ties to an increasingly interconnected world. 

McKay and Swift explore this Canadian peacekeeper cosmopolitan culture, one which, as McKay and Swift note, was similar to the Canadian British imperial identity in a number of ways, by exploring the careers of two famous post-World War Two Canadians, soldier Tommy Burns and, who imbibed both the imperial and the more cosmopolitan culture, and Lester Pearson, prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968. Pearson actually embodies, as McKay and Swift point up, the contradictions of Canadian post-World War II foreign policy. On the one hand, he was a partisan of Team Imperial America and played an important if ultimately limited and junior role in the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or NATO, an adjunct of American imperial power. On the other hand, he was a cosmopolitan mediator and peacemaker who played a significant role in the birth of the United Nations or the UN. Pearson's peacemaking credentials stemmed from his role in ending the Suez Crisis, for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. That "crisis" saw Great Britain, France, and Israel attack Egypt in 1956 in order to take control of the Suez Canal. Pearson's mediation played a major role in the British, French, and Israeli withdrawal from Egypt and from the canal. It would be Pearson's mediation of this conflict that would turn him into saintly hero number one in the pantheon associated with the image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, an image that would also gain some traction abroad. Despite this saintly image, however, Pearson was no Olof Palme, who was clearly far more non-partisan and non-aligned in the Cold War world than Pearson.

A third Canadian identity culture, according to McKay and Swift, arose around the same time as a revived liberalism with its fetishisation of the Market and the increasing dominance of neoliberalism in the English speaking world in the 1980s. This identity, according to McKay and Swift, is actually a latter day and technologically updated version, with a few new wrinkles thrown in for good measure, of the British Imperial identity culture. In Team Warrior Canada the United States has replaced Great Britain as the dominant power in the Anglosphere alliance of the US and its junior varsity partners the UK, Canada, and, increasingly, I might add, Australia, which recently agreed to allow an expansion of American military bases established in the 1960s and 1990s and the expansion of the number of American military bases on Australian soil.

There is currently, McKay and Swift argue, a culture war between these last two ideal identity types. Since the 1980s and particularly during the prime ministership of Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015, team warrior nation Canada, with its polemical and apologetic politicians, economic elites, and allied academics, has attempted to rebrand Canada from the peacekeeper nation of a partly imagined Pearson to the warrior nation of Harper. Using strategies similar to those of the Tories in England, the Republicans in the United States, and the Coalition in Australia, warrior nation Canada has attempted to transform Canada from a peacekeeper nation, a nation engaged in UN peacekeeping missions in places like the Middle East, to a Canada that is a warrior nation with strong ties to an increasingly Anglified  and American led NATO whose mission has increasingly become that of preserving and protecting the Anglosphere global order with its unstated mandate of making sure that petroleum flows from the peripheral and semi-peripheral world into the core nation world. They have done this using the tried and true methods right wing demagogues have long used to expand their power and authority; they have played on the fears and anxieties of the masses by emphasising the need for law and order in an increasingly dangerous world both at home and abroad. To combat domestic and foreign dangers team warrior nation Canada has promoted, through their partially government funded think tanks, their partially publicly funded military science programmes in Canadian universities, particularly at the University of Calgary (where Harper took degrees), their academic allies, their veterans sent into schools, and by increasing the links between the Canadian military and Canadian sports, particularly the national sport of Canada, a sport that is central to the Canadian civic faith, hockey, to promote increases in Canadian defence spending and increases in the number of Canadian military personnel. 

The strategies team warrior Canada have used in their attempts to rebrand Canada from a peacekeeper nation to a warrior are, of course, right out of the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, and anti-anarchist playbook that helped make America a conformist imperial warrior nation. They have demonised domestic critics. They have demonised enemy others. They have sacralised the Canadian military culture. They have marginalised critics by making it impossible for them to condemn military actions by claiming that any such criticism profanes the sacred service Canadian soldiers do. They have condemned and marginalised critics by claiming that they are utopians who don't understand that we live in a dog eat dog social darwinist world. They have claimed that Canada was made by war and by its warriors, starting at places like Vimy Ridge in France where Canadian troops, or so say the warrior historians, fought as Canadians for the first time. They have claimed that it was and is Canada's warriors who protect the true north's proud and free liberties and freedoms. They have claimed that Canada's warriors are chilvalrous white knights whose much needed mission is to protect the rights of all and particularly the rights of put upon women all across the globe, save in places, of course, like Saudi Arabia, a nation that violates civil and human rights, and particularly the rights of women regularly, because the Saudis are Canada's and America's oil buds and central to Canadian and American Middle Eastern policies and strategies.

As was the case with the similar strategies used in the US by people like A. Mitchell Palmer and Joseph McCarthy, the ideologies of team warrior Canada are, as McKay and Swift note, rent through with contradictions, some of which reek with the stench of the newspeak of George Orwell's 1984 and the surrealistic absurdities of Doctor Strangelove and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The government and its military, for instance, which is supposed to preserve and protect human rights, violates them en masse during wartime though you wouldn't know it given their governmental and media newspeak about humanitarian surgical strikes, smart bombs, and collateral damage. The government and its military, which claims to be promoting human rights and stabilising and improving the lives of those who it invades, seems to be more the destroyer of worlds than the builder of "civilised" little neo-West simulations all across the globe. What it does make the world safe for, of course, is American style exploitative corporate capitalism. The government and its military wax romantically about protecting women from misogynist fundamentalist sects, assuming, of course, that their presence in places like Afghanistan actually did improve the position of women before they cut and ran leaving women to their  fates in a post war Afghanistan run by the Taliban, the very enemy they fought and claimed victory over in a seeming repeat of what happened when the US cut and ran in South Vietnam in the 1970s. The government, its military, and its increasingly militarised police forces that are supposed to be preserving and protecting freedoms and liberties at home, has created a 1984 like surveillance state that violates civil liberties on a regular basis both at home and abroad. The government and military that whinges and whines about the welfare state actually eats at the teat of the big welfare state wanting even further redistribution of taxpayers monies from the civilian population to the military (all wrapped up, of course, in a bow of tax cuts for the rich). The government and the peace is our profession military claims that the only way to bring about peace is through never ending wars against an evil abstract enemy. It is hard not to notice that this imagined Canada of warrior princes fighting for Western truth, Western justice, Western manliness, and thimbleberry pie seems to comes right out of a fictive manichean comic book world that is not that different from the tall tales in The Boy's Own Annual. Plus good doubleplus good.

Who will triumph in this identity war between the two identity groups? Stay tuned. In the meantime those of you interested in cultural history, the history of identity, and the militarisation of Canadian, America, and, by extension, Australia society should check out this superb book.

 

The Books of My Life: The Cultural Geography of the United States

 

I have been interested in culture for some time. It was an interest in culture, in fact, that led me to major in Religious Studies during my undergraduate years for early on in my intellectual life I realised that religion has been a central if not the central  cultural meaning system (particularly if you add in the ideology of the divine right of rulers and the ideologies associated with nationalism) in human societies across time and over space. 

This interest in culture and meaning eventually drew me, in my postgraduate years, to Cultural Anthropology, to Cultural Sociology, and to Cultural History, each of which, after all, I realised, made culture--not the high culture of literary and art historians, but the broad culture of societies--the glue that, rightly according to social scientist Emile Durkheim held societies together--central to what they studied. 

Culture has, ever since, remained central to my intellectual and scholarly life. It was at the heart of my essay in New York History on the culture war over the Woodstock Festival of 1969 and it was at the heart of my book on Mormon intellectual culture, Mormon Studies: A Critical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021).

I don't recall exactly when I first discovered Cultural and Historical Geographer Wilbur Zelinsky's book on the culture of the United States (The Cultural Geography of the United States: A Revised Edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993). It had to have been sometime during my undergraduate years at Indiana University in Bloomington, a university that had one of the leading undergraduate and graduate programmes in Folklore and in Ethnomusicology, both of which explored aspects of American culture. I recall picking up a used copy of the 1972 edition of the book and diving into it sometime in the late 1970s and was impressed by it for it seemed to me to be an excellent syntheses of cultural anthropology (of a complex modern society and culture), cultural history, and historical and cultural geography.

Recently, I picked up the revised edition of The Cultural Geography of the United States as I wanted to revisit Zelinsky's seminal monograph and read his more recent thoughts on the subject of the cultural geography of the United States. In the revised edition of the book Zelinsky has left the first four chapters of the monograph as they were in the 1972 edition adding only a substantial fifth chapter titled "America in Flux", a chapter that extends Zelinsky's analysis of American culture and American cultures through the postmodernist 1990s, a period which saw increasing economic, cultural, and demographic globalisation, an era that saw the extension of global forms of communication, an era that saw deindustrialisation, and an era that saw increasing fragmentation and crises of identity across the Western world.

There are a number of things I like about Zelinsky's book. Zelinsky does a excellent job of exploring the origins of American culture (English, British, European, African, Indigenous, Immigrant), the statics of American culture, the dynamics of American culture, and the complexity of American culture. He does an excellent job of exploring the concept of culture, if rather later in the book than I expected. I expected Zelinsky's general discussion of culture to be in the introduction rather than in chapter two of the monograph. He explores the debate over whether the United States had and has a civil religion, a public religion, or a common civic culture, answering, like Durkheim and Robert Bellah before him in the affirmative. He nicely explores American regional cultures, specifically the American traditional regional cultures associated with New England, the South, the Midland, the Middle West, and the Middle West. He nicely explores the issue of whether a regional culture of the American West can be delineated. He excellently explores American regional subcultures like the Mormon culture of the Mormon cultural region of Utah and parts of Idaho and Arizona, the Rio Grande subculture of the Southwest, the Southern California subculture, and the subculture of historically Baptist and Methodist parts of Texas. In the added chapter Zelinsky nicely returns to the terrain he trod earlier and brings the text up to theoretical and empirical date by reflecting on what postmodernism means for the study of the cultural geography and cultural history of the United States and what has changed and not changed about American culture in the intervening decades. I particularly appreciated his discussion of the complexities of American culture, with its subcultures, and countercultures and the many and sundry ways American culture and American cultures are expressed.

The Cultural Geography of the United States should be mandatory reading for cultural and historical geographers, cultural historians, cultural sociologists, and cultural anthropologists interested in the culture of complex societies and particularly the historical cultural geography of the United States, those interested in culture, subcultures and countercultures, cultural diffusion, and cultural innovation. All this makes Zelinsky's The Cultural Geography of the United States a model study of American  historical and cultural geography. Highly recommended.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Interpreting Television

 

You wouldn't know it from watching reaction videos to Joss Whedon's television show Buffy the Vampire on YouTube, but there are several ways one can analyse a sophisticated (multi-tonal, multi-generic, novelistic, reflexive) television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One, for instance, can analyse Buffy on the literal or surface level by focusing on the story or stories the show tells. One can, in other words, explore the plot, narrative, and characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer though novelistic plotting and narrative are not fully grasped by most reactors who don't understand that early chapters or episodes of the novel provide the template and foundation for what comes after. One can analyse Buffy normatively or emotionally, though hopefully only after gaining a familiarity with the story or stories Buffy tells. This is, generally speaking, the me likee or me don't likee level of "analysis". One can analyse the metaphorical or allegorical level of Buffy. One of the key metaphors in the high school years of Buffy is the high school as hell metaphor and the vampires, demons, and monsters that represent or reflect that key metaphor in seasons one through three of the show, though the metaphors don't end there. One can analyse the mythological or world building aspects of Buffy and the logic of that created world. Vampires in Buffy, for instance, go "poof" when they are slain and hardly anyone knows that Buffy is the slayer, the fighter of killers, demons, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night, a "reality", noted in the second part of the very first episode of the series. One can analyse Buffy on the social ethical level. Buffy reflects Joss Whedon's social ethical existentialism, an existentialism where good and evil are more grey than black and white and in which the "good" fight is often less than epic and never ends. One can analyse the mise-en-scene of Buffy, the everything that is within the fame of Buffy and how it is edited together. One of the art class instruments to the left of the fame is, for instance, askew in the Buffy episode "The Body" as Buffy tells Dawn, in the frame within the frame (something that makes Dawn's art class as it looks through the window frame at Dawn and Buffy outside the classroom and us viewers as we look through the frame within the frame voyeurs of something inherently intimate), that their mother has died suddenly, an askewness that reflects the askewness Joyce's death brings with it not only for Buffy and Dawn but for a the entire Scooby gang whose surrogate "mother" Joyce was. The degree of sophistication of literal, normative, metaphorical/allegorical, mythological, mise-en-scene, and social ethical analysis, of course, can vary greatly since they are all intimately tied to the degree of cultural capital.

Not all of these levels of analysis, hence, are tabula rasa or self-evident. One learns the various ways to analyse a television show, a film, or a book through education, study, and schooling and the cultural capital one accrues through one's life course. If the evidence of social media is prologue most of those who react to Buffy start and stop at the simplest levels of analysis, the literal and the normative. EvilQK, one of the Buffy reactors chosen at random for observation, for instance, summarises or tries to summarise the story of the previous episode of Buffy she watched at the beginning of each subsequent reaction video after her reaction to the first episode of Buffy "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest". Her reactions are salt and peppered with comments about liking certain characters, liking mean girls, not liking certain clothes the characters wear (sans any reflection on what the clothes characters wear reflect about them), prognostication, and comments saying that would never happen, a curious response to a television show about vampires who aren't, of course, real. But then those who engage in literalist and normative "criticism" are often embedded in a simplistic and unreflective ideology of realism, a notion that television, film, and television must, on some level, be real and realistic. Buffy, by the way, is very "realistic" on the emotional level exploring as it does the pain of life. 

In the end, most reaction videos on YouTube are not that different from what one would expect of a junior or senior high school student. They summarise and likee or not likee. That many YouTube reactors, many of whom presumably have attended college and university college and university degrees, rarely move beyond the literal and normative levels points up how so many contemporary undergraduate colleges and universities have become more like high school since the 1970s since the rise of literalist, fundamentalist, and consumerist oriented bah humbug neo-liberalism which is slowly but surely killing liberal education.

 

The Books of My Life: Joss Whedon (Pascale)

I have never really been enamoured of biographies, particularly biographies published primarily for the fanboy and fangirl market. Popular biographies have always seemed to me to have several almost insurmountable problems. They don't, for instance, seem to be grounded in any sort of idea about what is significant (economically, politically, culturally, demographically, or geographically) and what is not. As a result, many of them are encyclopedic including within their pages almost anything that seems to fit between its covers regardless of whether it is important or not (the kitchen sink approach to biography). Additionally, they generally take a non-critical stance to their subject. They too often fail to recognise that the interviews and the oral histories they draw on, particularly those done with Hollywood popular culture notables who are still alive, are rarely if ever objective or dispassionate and thus require a critical perspective from anyone engaged in biographical retellings, something we rarely get in fanboy and fan girl biographies of their heroes. Finally, they are often, and in the case of popular culture figures usually are, written by devotees of the subject of the biography and thus represent a kind of latter day version of the early first century lives of Christian saints. They are too often, in other words, hagiographic.

Amy Pascale's Joss Whedon, Geek King of the Universe: A Biography (London: Aurum, 2014)  is a well written and well researched biography of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century auteur Joss Whedon. Joss Whedon tells the tale of the life and work of television and film celebrity, writer, director, and producer Joss Whedon in extensive and impressive detail, from his birth in 1964 in New York City to the release of his blockbuster movie The Avengers/Avengers Assemble and the release of his art film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, both in the year 2012.

To Pascale's credit, while her biography of Whedon is to a large extent hagiographic, it also gives readers a glimpse of a Joss Whedon and the shows that he has created with some warts. Pascale notes, for instance, that there was tension on the Buffy set between Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers, David Boreanaz, who played Angel in Buffy and in its spinoff Angel (1999-2004), and other members of the cast and crew. Some members of the cast and crew, apparently, felt that there was too much star behaviour from the two on set. Pascale notes that there were tensions between Buffy's cast and crew and Jeff Pruitt, who was responsible for the stunts on Buffy seasons two through four when he was made redundant. These tensions spilled over to the official posting board of the show, the Bronze, when Pruitt posted his version about why he and his wife, Buffy's stunt double Sophia Crawford, were let go from the show, posts Whedon responded to on the Bronze. Pascale notes that there were tensions between Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase in Buffy and Angel, and Whedon. Carpenter, after she got pregnant apparently necessitating the reworking of several Angel episodes, was fired at the end of season four of that show leaving her feeling, she says, "blindsided" and "heartbroken". Carpenter would be brought back and her character arc wrapped up in the 100th episode of the show. Pascale notes that there was tension between Vincent Kartheiser, who played Angel's son Connor on Angel, and Angel's writers and show runners including Whedon. Kartheiser apparently felt that his character was superfluous and caught in a seemingly never ending narrative loop. 

Whedon himself has implied on several occasions in a number of interviews he has given over the years--some of which are referenced in Pascale's book--that it was sometimes necessary for him to act like the adult on set, that he oftentimes had to play the role of general on his shows, and that he could get upset when lines he wrote for Buffy were not delivered in the way he wanted. Whedon, in other words, seems to admit in these interviews that he is at least a little bit of a bully and probably a lot of a bit of a perfectionist. Add to this the claims that Whedon was a womaniser, some of which he has denied, claims that came fast and furious in 2018 and 2020, and one can easily see why hagiographies, even hagiographies with some warts thrown in, like Pascale's, are problematic.

Many readers will probably want to know whether I found Pascale's biography of Whedon better than, the same, or worse than other biographies of Whedon. I haven't read Constance Haven's biography (Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy, Dallas: Benbella, 2003) so I can't compare this biography with that of Pascale's. I have read David Lavery's biography of Whedon (Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Marvel's Avengers, London: Tauris, 2014), a biography which "reads" Whedon's life and work through the prism of psychological theories of creativity. Of the two, I found--and I do realise that value is in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder--Pascale's biography more enlightening and educational than Lavery's. Pascale's biography is based on an enormous amount of research, including oral histories Pascale did with Whedon and others that knew him and worked with him and as such has all the advantages (and disadvantages), of a biography written by someone who is somewhat of an insider. Pascale was, after all, an early poster on the Bronze message board, a message board that many of those who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), including Whedon, visited and even posted on on occasion, and was later an attendee at the poster board parties that Whedon and others from Buffy attended. She thus had access to Whedon and his friends and co-workers in a way Lavery did not. Lavery's biography, which relies largely on already published interviews along with a few conversations with Whedon associates, is an outsider biography written by an academic who is also a Whedon fanboy and this schizophrenia negatively impacts, in my opinion, the quality of Lavery's book.  Lavery's biography is also constrained by the author's focus on artistic creativity making it somewhat, at least in my opinion, schematic.

I do hope, at some point, that those of us interested in Joss Whedon and his work will get a thorough, analytical, and scholarly biography of Whedon. Whedon, after all, is a key figure in American television history and for my money, Whedon's television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly (2002-2003) are amongst the finest television programmes and films I have ever seen and likely will ever see. Buffy and Firefly are, in my opinion, art of the highest order despite or in spite of being made within a Hollywood studio system that seems to prefer films with little plot and cardboard characters to multi-level narrative, plot, metaphor, and philosophical depth like the work of Whedon. Someday, once someone is able to gain access to all or most of the primary source material related to Whedon and his work we will, I hope, get the biography of Whedon, warts and all, this auteur deserves, a biography that will, like Buffy and Firefly themselves also stand the test of time. Until that time Pascale's fine if flawed scholarly fan biography will have to suffice.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Amateur Hour

 

One thing that is fascinating about social media reaction videos is that they are largely, if not exclusively, the territorial domain of the amateur. What is perhaps even more fascinating is that these amateurs want to remain amateurs. They do little if any research on the shows they are watching. Many Buffy the Vampire Slayer reactors, for instance, do not do any research on the show they are watching and seem blissfully unaware that Fox, when it transferred Buffy into high defintition did it in the most amateurish way possible distorting the original academy aspect ratio and even changing the colour scheme of some shots, particularly special effects shots. Even so-called professionals seem amateurs in skank capitalist America these days. Being sure that they are watching a Buffy text that looks the way those who created Buffy wanted the show to look a does not seem at all important to them though admittedly some of them have switched to the original recording of the show when they learn about Fox's massive cock-up in reproducing the series in hi def

This amateurism and near valorisation of amateurism has a long history both in general and in the United States in particular. The US, for example, has a long tradition of anti-intellectual intellectualism stretching back to the anti-intellectual intellectualisms of old Europe and particularly England and to the rise of anti-intellectual Christianity in the US in the 18th century. Many right wing Christians, for instance, seem to have no problem with the fact that much if not most of their biblical interpretations are  grounded in an almost total lack of historical knowledge and a lack of knowledge of the original languages of the Bible, the book they consider holy, though not holy enough to actually do more than amateur surface research on a book they consider to be the word of god. What is, of course, humorous and absurd about such interpretations is that even right wing Christians cannot agree on the message of the book they consider holy writ. Welcome to a world with multiple domains of blissdom.

Recently, while watching Buffy reaction videos on YouTube, I happened upon EvilQK's Buffy reactions. It wasn't EvilQK's amateurish "readings" of Buffy that drew my attention, however. It was some of the comments reacting to EvilQK's reaction videos on Buffy season one episodes. Many if not all of these, seemed at least to me, to be prime examples of what one might call fundamentalist or amateur approaches to Buffy, approaches that revel in a kind of anti-intellectual intellectual amateurism. Shadowman4710 and Roderick Hale, for instance, posted, in third person god like declarative sentences that are the common currency of amateur fanboy and fangirl reactors, that "Angel" (1:7) was the first really great episode of Buffy. Did they, however, cite any data that supported their "hypothesis"? Of course not. This is amateur hour after all and empirical data related to hypotheses seems totally unimportant to those locked into amateur fanboy and fangirl mode. And many wonder why so many fall for loopy conspiracy theory bullshite these days.

The poster I found most interesting on EvilQK's "Angel" reaction was Paul Knight. Knight, like posters on social media in general, plays in god like declarative sentences implying that only his perspective is the right one, an approach, of course, typically characteristic of fundamentalisms of all types whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and more recently, Hindu. Knight goes on to argue that season one of Buffy "sucks" (note the level of "critical" discourse here) and that it was, generally speaking, "lame" and "corny" (note the lack of scholarly definitional precision here). He tried to "prove" this hypothesis by citing audience viewing data. For Knight, season one of Buffy, because it drew smaller viewer audiences than season two, was of lesser artistic value to later seasons that drew greater numbers of viewers, relatively speaking.

Needless to say, anyone familiar with empirical and analytical approaches can find a lot to scratch one's head about when engaging Knight's discourse. First off, Knight, like others of his amateur ilk, fails to recognise the empirical fact that beauty is in the socialised eyes of the beholder. It is an empirical fact that some of those who watched Buffy actually "liked" season one of Buffy and that not every reactor was a fan of the episode "Angel". Many novice reactors, in fact, considered "The Witch" (1:2) to be one of their favourite if not their favoourite first season episodes of Buffy. To get personal, for a moment, I am a fan of "The Pack" (1:6) and "Nightmares" (1:10) and regard both as two of my favourite episodes of Buffy because of their emotional terror, Xander's monologue about not having to look at Willow's pasty face any more in the former and Buffy's father's horrific speech to Buffy in the latter. So, claiming that "Angel" is the first great episode of Buffy is rather problematic given that no evidence is provided to support such a claim and no evidence is given to indicate that the majority of Buffy viewers like "Angel" the best. Furthermore, the claim that Buffy is "lame" and "corny" fails to address the fact that Buffy was intentionally parodic and satiric (I assume this is some of what amateur reactors mean by "lame" and "corny", terms that are as anemically defined as that other favourite of the post baby boomers, "cheesy"), among other tonal things.

Second, Knight's attempt to argue that Buffy season one is "lame" and "corny" because fewer people watched it than in season two and season three ignores several facts, paramount among them the fact that quantity does not and never has been a synonym for quality. A show like Seventh Heaven, for instance, also, like Buffy, on the WB and, in fact, the show that the WB chose to go ahead with over Buffy. drew, by season two and particularly in seasons three and four, substantially more viewers than Buffy (for a variety of different reasons, of course) ever did. Does that mean that Seventh Heaven is superior to Buffy? It drew more viewers after all. I certainly wouldn't make that argument but then I am not a devotee of the commodity aestheticism that dominates so much American culture these days. Furthermore, Knight ignores the fact that Buffy was a mid-season replacement on the WB, hence the twelve episode season one order and no promise of renewal from the netlet. Given that mid-season replacements usually take time to build momentum and increase viewership in the American television landscape at the time (this is now almost passe even at HBO, the network that sold itself by being different), the lower viewing numbers for season one compared to later seasons, though Buffy viewing numbers were akin to the capitalist economy with booms and busts over seven seasons, are understandable. 

Finally, there is the issue of whether Knight understands classical narrative styles, of which Buffy is an example. The fact of the matter is that Buffy season one sets the template for the rest of the seasons of Buffy. In this it is like Lev Tolstoy's classic for a reason Anna Karenina where the early chapters of the book set the template for the narrative, plot, and character developments to come and are, as a consequence, essential to the reader if he or she is to fully grasp the essence of that book. Like Anna, Buffy season one gives us characters who develop over the course of the season and of the show. It gives us the colour scheme that will dominate the show. It gives us the first big bad of the show. It gives us the mise-en-scene that will dominate the show at least through season three. It gives us the tonal complexity that will characterise the show including comedy, drama, tragedy, satire, parody, melodrama, and emotional and other horrors. It is, by the way, this tonal complexity that, I would argue, makes Buffy one of the most interesting television shows ever made. And it gives us the attention to detail and continuity that makes Buffy one of, in my mind, aesthetically successful television shows ever made, something that differentiates Buffy from earlier shows that ultimately (particularly for commercial reasons; both of these cult shows became mainstream and this negatively impacted narrative continuity) were characterised more by discontinuity than continuity, shows like Twin Peaks and The X-files.

I am sure none of these criticisms will be relevant to the amateurs with their uncritical and unreflective fetishisations and universalisations who populate and dominate the landscape of social media these days. it is, however, relevant, to those of us who seek to understand and fully grasp the human comedy, farce, tragedy, and drama in all of its absurdity.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Radiant Future is Now

 

One would think that after the twentieth century, an era characterised by technological utopianism along with the many negative impacts of this technological change, that many more post-baby boomers would be skeptical of the notion that now, today, is the best of all possible technological worlds. Even a quick peek at reaction videos on social media and particularly YouTube, however, quickly disabuses one of the hypotheses that technological utopianism has declined in the wake of a century of genocide, mass murder, and environmental devastation, much of it, of course, the product of the very technological changes many regard as utopian. After all, while the twentieth century gave us the washing machine, the motor car, aeroplanes, and cotton candy, which was developed in the late nineteenth century, it also gave us the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the mass murders at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, toxic chemicals in the environment and in our homes, and climate change. One would think that by no2 many, as many counterculturalists recognised in the nineteen-sixties, would realise the fact that technology, like virtually everything, is a double edged sword.

Recently, while doing ethnography on YouTube, I ran across a reaction video on the first episode of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) by one EvilQK. I found a number of things interesting about this "reaction" video beyond the fact that EvilQK did not do much research about the television show (something that seemingly 99% of YouTube reactors do not do) and as a consequence had little sense of the economic realities Buffy had to operate within in season one or the intentions of those who created and made Buffy. Like so many of her generation it became quickly apparent that EvilQK is embedded within a ideology in which current technologies are thought to be inherently better than those of the past and this led her to take a highly critical stance on the special effects of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. According to Evil, if only Buffy had been made today it would have been so much better.

But does the supposed technology primitivism of Buffy and a host of other television and films of the past damn these shows to a special level of critical hell? Many post-baby boomers, of course, enamoured of special effects as they are today, miss several facts. First, given that technological change in film and television is a constant, and perhaps even more constant in the brave new digital era, they don't seem to grasp the simple historical fact that the technologies of today will seem primitive from the vantage point of the future given that technological change is a constant. Many post-baby boomers, in other words, lack a historical sense and consciousness when it comes to television and film and beyond.

Second, and this is something that post-baby boomers don't seem to grasp either, on an aesthetic or artistic level technological change is not always, if we want to engage in a descriptive meets normative analysis, for the better. Black and white, something that seems to be seen by many of todays post-baby boomers as evil incarnate for a variety of reasons--it is coded as old and hence inferior by many and it is seen as less "realistic" than colour television and film--is actually artistically much more interesting than generally bland colour television shows and films. The reason for this is simple, it is difficult if not impossible for colour television shows or films to manipulate light and dark, shadows, fog, or smoke rings, in the way that black and white can and has in the classic past. This is not to say that some colour television or film do not strive for and even achieve visual art. The colour television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, uses filters, including red filters for obvious reasons, and the contrast between light and dark in very interesting ways. In many ways, in fact, Buffy is so dark that it seems like a colour television striving for black and white and the aesthetics of black and white. Additionally, the gorgeous colour film Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) uses colour in an artistically breathtaking way as anyone who has seen that cult film hopefully recognises. Killer Klowns is, however, the exception that proves the rule that colour is, generally speaking, less interesting and less artistically successful than black and white films in general. Classics are classics for a reason.

This notion that technology today is better than the technology of the past is, of course, grounded in a number of cultural ideologies. It is, as I noted, grounded in the utopian notion that the past is prologue to the present and the present is better than the past, an ideology that goes back at least to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. This notion is also grounded in the ideology that realism is always better, an ideological notion also tied to ahistorical notions that the present is more realistic than the past because of superior technologies that, it is believed, make television shows and films progressively more realistic. Technological teleologism. This notion that television shows and films of the present are more real than the past, of course, in order to be believed, must elide the fact that many considered nineteenth century photography and films, particularly talking films in black and white, more realistic than the painting and theatre that came before it. It is a notion that is also grounded in an absurd contradiction because television and shows before digital technologies were actually more realistic since they actually blew up real cars rather than computer simulations and filmed rain that looked more like rain than digital technologies. And this is a notion that, as very few reactors grasp, is grounded in a delusion for neither television or film, including documentaries, are realistic given that they manipulate story, narrative, plot, tone, music, and mise-en-scene for dramatic, tragic, comic, for entertainment and financial, and, if in much less numbers, for artistic purposes. Neither television or film is thus real. Real would be following me around 24-7 as I go to the restroom, cook, clean, or watch television and films, all things that would bore most viewers probably to death. Interestingly, if social media polemicists and apologists for realism really wanted realism in their films they would watch the films of European directors like Ingmar Bergman or Eric Rohmer (though admittedly America had its cinematic and television realism--real locations--in Naked City (film, 1948, television, 1958-1963) and Route 66 (1960-1964). They won't do this because, of course, because they have an emotion based irrational fear and hatred of subtitles. Welcome to the world of the analytically challenged.

In the end, it is, speaking of tone, a tragedy and a comedy perhaps even a farce that so many post-baby boomers who have been socialised into the Hollywood special effects dominated television and film unthinkingly (embodying) think that that form of television and film is the only television show or film worth watching. It is a tragedy because it means that so many don't understand that classic films and television shows are founded on story, plot, narrative, and character development, something lacking in any deep way in so much of the, at best, mediocre film and television product that comes out of Hollywood and its many close cousins these days. It is a farce because this situation where culture and ideology creates reality keeps happening again and again in human communities despite the availability of evidence, at least to those empirically inclined, that shows that the present is not really better than the past. It may be different but in the end humans, who have produced these new technologies, are, like the technologies they produce, a double edged sword. They too are flawed.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Is That Really in the Text?:

 

Ethnography, the study of human behaviour in real world geographical, political, economic, demographic, and cultural settings, has long been at the heart of professional social and cultural anthropology. In fact, going to an "exotic" locale for a period of time to study, observe, and even participate in how real human beings, or at least one important human being, an informant, thinks, behaves, and interacts has long been a central rite of passage in the training of professional social and cultural anthropologists for around a hundred years in the discipline.

The rise and spread of new digital media such as social media like YouTube, has provided ethnographers with a somewhat novel "exotic" setting that they can travel to all from the comfort of their "armchairs" in front of their computer screens, an exotic setting that allows them to explore "real" human behaviour in action in the brave new world of digital media. Today's ethnographer,  for example, can travel to YouTube land and observe what real people think about television shows, movies, books, or music. 

Since the Covid crisis a number of reactors have posted their reactions to the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer which ran on the WB and later UPN from 1997 to 2003. As always the ethnographer has be cautious about ethnographic work in cyberland since informants, which is basically what social media reactors are, aren't always forthright about their reactions to television shows, films, books, and music. They, after all, tend to give positive responses to what the see and hear since positive responses, almost certainly, garner more comments and likes and hence monies, meagre monies it is true, for the YouTube reactor. Additionally, although one can find commonalities in how reactors react to a television show like Buffy, ethnography is not, as quantitative methodologists love to remind those engaged in qualitative ethnography, grounded in a random sample. And while those who react to Buffy do not constitute a random sample of viewers and reactors they do constitute a convenience sample and as such reveal a lot about how those who chose to react to Buffy react to Buffy.

Recently I have been observing and occasionally participating (by responding in the comments section)  in the reactions of two reactors to Buffy, Dakara or Dakara Jane and JayPeaKay. Both of these reactors are, I suspect, part of one of the post-baby boom cohorts. Both also hail from England, the former likely from Liverpool and the latter from the Home Counties, though whether this matters in a globalised media world is an open question. Both Dakara and Jay been reacting to the third season of Buffy pretty much simultaneously though Jay is slightly ahead of Dakara in his viewing at this point. Both have also been characterised by a similar reaction to the Big Bad of season three (Buffy has a Big Bad that the Scoobies, Buffy and her friends-allies, fight during each of the seven seasons of the show), Sunnydale's Mayor Richard Wilkins.

It is in season three of Buffy that viewers were introduced to the third slayer in the, Buffyverse, Faith. It also introduces, as Buffy does in each new season, to the newest of the Big Bads, the mayor. One interesting aspect of previous seasons of Buffy and of season three of the show are the parallels it draws between a series of doubles or doppelgängers.  In season three, for instance, the show draws parallels between the two slayers, Buffy and Faith, just as in season two the show drew parallels between slayer Buffy and slayer Kendra. This parallelism and doubling, by the way, allows Buffy to escape the iron cage of manicheanism that characterises so many American television cop, fantasy, and science fiction shows. Season three also draws parallels between the two caring surrogate father figures of those two slayers, Giles, the surrogate father figure of Buffy, and the mayor, the surrogate father figure of Faith after the episode "Bad Girls/Consequences". Season three, it should also be noted, also introduces us to doubles of Willow and Xander, two of Buffy's friends and slayerettes, VampWillow, Xander and VampXander, and reintroduces us to one of Giles's doubles, his friend from his rebellious college years and now nemesis, Ethan Rayne. Parallelism and doublings are central aspects to the Buffy text.

While earlier episodes of Buffy season three foregrounded similarities between the two slayers-- Faith, called to be a slayer after the death of by the book Kendra who, in turn, was called to slayerhood as a consequence of the brief death of Buffy in the finale of season one, "Prophecy Girl"--also foregrounds significant differences between the two slayers, differences that turn out to foreshadow things to come in season three and beyond in both Buffy and its spinoff Angel. Buffy is a less by the watcher book then Kenya while at the same time being a more by the watcher book than the rash "want, take, have" Faith. These differences become particularly apparent in the important nearly two hour long episode "Bad Girls/Consequences" in the middle of the season, the episode in which the rash Faith, despite Buffy's attempt to stop her before she sinks her wooden stake into what turns out to be the Deputy Mayor Allan Finch, becomes a murderer and killer. Faith reacts in Nietzschean fashion to her murder of Finch arguing that slayers are outside of and above the law because of the role they play in preserving human life and human society. We more than balance out the scales, Faith claims. For Faith slayers are thus uberfraus who save the world again and again from seemingly endless apocalypses. Buffy, on the other hand morally wrestles with the death of Finch and grieves for the murder of an "innocent". By the end of the episode Faith, who, the Buffy text has told us and shown us on several occasions has issues, goes to work for the mayor after she kills his right hand vampire man, Mr. Trick, while saving, somewhat ironically, Buffy's life in the process.

Despite the clear parallels between Giles and the mayor in the Buffy text--both, the show repeatedly shows and tells us, care deeply for their charges, Giles for Buffy, and the mayor for Faith--both Dakara and Jay interpreted the textual evidence of the mayor being, like Giles, a surrogate father for their respective slayers, in skeptical if not cynical fashion. Both thought the mayor was simply using Faith, manipulating her, solely for his own personal devilish ends, namely, his plan to ascend to pure demon, something that happens in the last episode of the season. 

Why this jaded interpretation of the mayor? Was it the product of the dissonance associated with Faith, someone they repeatedly said they liked, going rogue by taking a job with the mayor? Both Dakara and Jay, after all, mentioned that they didn't think that Faith was evil and that they believed and hoped that at some point she would see the error or her ways and return to the white hated Scooby fold. Was it the product of increasing numbers of sensationalistic media reports since the 1970s about older men (or older women) using young people for their own selfish ends? Was it due to the increasing cynicism of young about politicians, a cynicism that has increased since the 1970s? Was it due to an emotional reaction to the relationship between younger women and older men, one that has become increasingly common since the 1970s? Both Dakara and Jay, after all, had a similar reaction to the romantic interest the 18 year old Cordelia, a sometime Scooby, who, by California law is an adult who can thus marry without parental consent, expressed toward the new watcher of season three, Wesley, a relationship, by the way, played for comedy in the Buffy text. Was it the product of that new life cycle stage, young adulthood with its arrested adolescence, something that can be traced to changes in the economy (globalisation, postmodernism and the dominance of the retail sector with its low paying jobs)? Is it a study diet of manichean Hollywood fairy tale films and television programmes--Buffy is not one of these thankfully--where the villians are pure evil and the good guys are pure good? Is it some combination of these?

Whatever the source or sources of this "reading", what was interesting to me was that the interpretation of the Faith mayor relationship of season three was an extra-textual interpretation that overrode what the text itself actually "said". After all, as the Buffy text clearly and repeatedly shows and tells us, the mayor, who is actually honest and genuine in his expression of family values and fear of germs, is forthright in his love for Faith, a love that Faith needs, a love that the Scoobies cannot provide for Faith, and a devotion that proves to be the mayor's Achilles heel in the finale of season three, "Graduation Day". It is, in fact, the mayor's love for Faith that proves his undoing and allows Buffy and her slayerettes to defeat the mayor in the finale of season three. It is, of course, that fact, the fact that the mayor genuinely cares for Faith, that closes off any counter interpretation of the relationship between the two like the empirically problematic one offered by Dakara and Jay.

Readings of the mayor and Faith relationship are not the only misinterpretations of the text one finds among Buffy reactors. The LexiCrowd and SoFieReacts, for instance, have been waxing apoplectically about Giles's attempt in season six, the, according to Joss Whedon, "oh grow up" season of Buffy, to get Buffy to act responsibly toward her financial and family obligations, an attempt that ultimately results in Giles returning to England since that is the only way he sees of not "standing in the way" of Buffy growing up. Both of these post-baby boomers--GenXers? GenZeders?--have criticised Giles in the harshest of terms on numerous occasions for leaving Buffy. One has to wonder, as one did with respect to those who misinterpret the mayor/Faith relationship, if the reason for this is generational and hence social and cultural, if it is the product, in other words, of generational differences between those who grew up in an era typified by that new life course category of young adult and who are increasingly living into their thirties, in some cases, with their parents and those who grew up in the era of you left home at 18, got a job--which were plentiful and often lasted a work lifetime- immediately became and adult and almost immediately started down the primrose path to having 3.67 children.