Reaction Videos and the Endless Reflection of Spectatorship
In a YouTube video published by the FineBros “REACT” channel, a cast of teenagers react to pop star Billie Eilish reacting to those same teenagers reacting to a Billie Eilish music video, inviting a play of infinite regression. It’s a highly polished, self-referential version of a previously amateurish, unreflexive format; a reaction video.
In a reaction video, we watch someone else watching and enjoy their response as much, if not more, than the content itself. The format has been popular on YouTube since 2007 when people began posting reaction videos to gross-out viral clips like 2 Girls 1 Cup, but Japanese television has used a similar format (an insert box of another viewer, typically a celebrity, reacting to the content on-screen) since the 1980s. Reaction videos have come to encompass nearly all types of content; people reacting to intense moments in Game of Thrones, to incredible sports plays, to movie trailers — and since 2010, channels like FineBros have monetized the format; taking it out of people’s cluttered living rooms and into polished studios with paid “reactors.” As such, the reaction video has moved away from being a peek into the quotidian of 21st Century American life and has become another kind of branded content.
Videos like these from the FineBros massively successful “React” franchise (with over 10 million subscribers) have a face-value, bubblegum quality that makes intellectualization seem uncalled for. While the content is certainly not provocative, a close of reading of this video opens up a framework for interpreting this new and pervasive form of content. In its form, a single display 5-minute YouTube clip, the Eilish reaction video is standard fare for the website. But in its content, a continuous feedback loop between four levels of content, between commentary and performance, between spectatorship and engagement, the Eilish video distils the logic of a particular Web 2.0 user experience.
In the Billy Eilish video, not only is Eilish’s original music video barely visible, thrice-embedded in other frames; the video’s content is never discussed. Eilish’s video becomes a departure point for a chance for reactors to play and improvise with one another in discontinuous time, so that the final project is an assemblage of reflections and responses. The teens comment how excited they are that they’ve gotten to interact indirectly with Billy; they comment on her personality; they gesture emphatically and delight in seeing their original responses echoed by Billy. For Eilish and the teens alike, spectatorship becomes collapsed with performance and commentary. The FineBros have created a feedback loop in which the artist and the critics, not the art, have taken center stage.
In an analysis of K-Pop fandom (a community that widely employs reaction videos) Anna Lee Swan notes that fans mimicking dance moves and reproducing pop culture images with themselves embedded allows these fans to reassert bodily presence, insert emotion and personality into the reception of media, and create a sense of togetherness (Swan 23). However, in the FineBros videos, the most popular reaction videos on the internet, it is not everyday users but paid actors (re-actors) who respond to content — not mimicking dance moves in their living rooms but sitting still in a studio. The embodiment in these videos in an embodiment of spectatorship; seeing someone watch a video on their laptop as we do the same thing. And as re-actors on screen simultaneously perform and comment, so too does the Web user experiencing the video, inviting a physical and functional identification between user and re-actor.
What kind of spectator, then, is created by a reaction video of this kind? A certain physiological empathy is inherent to any reaction video: to see the gestures (furrowed brows, wide smiles, etc) of someone reacting to a clip is to experience it vicariously through them. But a plurality of actors (and windows), as Manovich notes in The Language of New Media, complicates simple viewer-subject identification (Manovich 73). More visible than gesture are the structural, communal qualities of video sharing sites like YouTube and Twitch — that even if viewing on one’s personal device, one is hardly spectating alone; we are constantly watching with others and through others, through comment sections and news feeds and embedded links. It is a form of spectatorship defined by a network.
Reaction videos thus reflect the increasing importance of a video’s shareability over its content. In Jodi Dean’s essay, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” she notes how web messages under contemporary capitalism have a greater exchange value than use value. In an internet culture which fetishizes abundance, speed, resolution, and the remixability of content, Dean argues, the unit of conversation shifts from “actions to elicit responses” to “contributions to circulating content”(Dean 7). And while the reaction video is literally a response (to some other piece of media), it is always defined by its status as second-order, as an addition or elaboration. In a media culture of overabundant spectatorship, commentary, and plasticity, it too takes on the quality of a contribution in a continuous flow of content rather than a point in a dialogue.
As such, the reaction video makes manifest the workings of the medium that facilitates it. In his article “Watching People Watching People Watching,” Sam Anderson argues that the reaction video stems primarily from a psychological drive, one of recapturing “primary experience.” I argue that this psychological drive must be considered in the material context of Web 2.0 practices — that the ethos of reaction videos must be evaluated in a technological context first. Take for example any number of movie trailer reaction “mashup” videos; hundreds of reactions to the same clip are played simultaneously in a grid of webcam videos. Here, individual responses are obscured by the sheer coexistence of spectators and content. The video predicts and visualizes the role of a comment section and hyper-linking. Any evaluation of how we respond to human gestures must consider the relationship a viewer has to those other humans in the first place. In the context of video sharing and social media, that relation is of users, collectively sharing, consuming, commenting on one another’s activities.
The reaction video as a biproduct of an internet culture prioritizing exchange value is complicated by the fact that the videos themselves prioritize affect and expression over information. As Heather Warren-Crow notes in her essay “Screaming like a girl: viral video and the work of reaction,” reaction videos are characterized by non-linguistic vocality; laughs, sobs, and screeches (Warren-Crow 3). Though most of the Avengers video above is unintelligible, one can hear the squeals and shrieks of the reactors quite clearly. The qualities of reaction videos explored here — the collapse of performance and viewing, the infinite regression of spectatorship, the visualization of network logic and interactivity — all coexist with the undeniable simplicity of a shriek of fear or giddy joy. Perhaps the appeal of these videos lies in this tension; paradoxically, reaction videos employ the immediate affect of bodily, non-informational sounds and gestures to distill a medium defined by the flow of immaterial information.
Works Cited
Anderson, Sam. “Watching People Watching People.” The New York Times Magazine. 25 Nov. 2011.
Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Politics of Foreclosure”. Cultural Politics, 1:1, 51–74, 2005.
Manovich, Lev. The Interface, The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Warren-Crow, Heather. “Screaming Like a Girl: Viral Video and the Work of Reaction.” Feminist Media Studies, 16:6, 1113–1117, 2016.
Swan, Anna Lee. “Situated Knowledge, Transnational Identities: Place and Embodiment in K-pop Fan Reaction Videos.” University of Washington. 2017.
