Reaction videos as “interpassive” aesthetic experiences: Understanding the meaning of diffuse media practices in the platform society

This article examines reaction videos as a distinctive case of interpassive media consumption in the platform society. Rather than reading them through the dominant frame of interactivity, we argue that reaction videos foreground forms of delegated affective and interpretive labor that trouble conventional understandings of agency in digital environments. By drawing on philosophical accounts of passivity as an ethical and aesthetic openness to otherness and on sociological theories of aesthetic cosmopolitanism and hermeneutic reflexivity, we show that some reaction videos–particularly those engaging with culturally “other” media– can foster receptive orientations toward alterity, enabling viewers to suspend judgment and inhabit unfamiliar perspectives. At the same time, these practices reveal the structural ambivalence of platform capitalism. The same mechanisms that enable encounters with difference–virality, algorithmic amplification–also sustain datafication, monetization, and homophilic filtering. Reaction videos thus illuminate how interpassive practices can be simultaneously exploited by platform logics and oriented toward subtle forms of ethical-aesthetic re-signification. As a conceptual case, they shed light on broader dynamics through which contemporary platform environments reconfigure the relationship between power, aesthetic forms, and online relationality, showing that even within algorithmically steered systems, opportunities for reinterpreting and redirecting digital relationality remain possible.