Pop culture expert Amanda Kehrberg joined The Show to recap some of the major themes of 2024, starting with one of the year’s earliest viral moments. Back in January, the Sesame Street character Elmo asked a fateful question on X: “How is everybody doing?”
The reactions were swift and abundant: people were not doing well. Elmo received over 19,000 replies, and did his best to reply with helpful advice. As Amanda told The Show, she watched it all unfold with a certain amount of disbelief.
Full conversation
AMANDA KEHRBERG: I think for me, Elmo's always been kind of the aspirational consumer puppet. Like one of the first things that I mean he was, he was Cinder Elmo, so he's, you know, he's a climber and one of the first things I learned from Elmo when I was a kid was Elmo got new shoes.
SAM DINGMAN: Well, Elmo may have a new job. I was reading a piece on NPR about this, and I'm curious to get your take on it. The piece was sort of making the case that Elmo was a weirdly good therapist, and that he displayed three of the characteristics that are often associated with a good mental health professional, which are congruence, meaning authenticity and genuineness. Acceptance, Elmo ended all of his responses to everybody with Elmo loves you. And empathy, that comes from understanding another person, and Elmo would sort of frequently try to like rhyme with what the person was feeling and then offer a practical step.
KEHRBERG: Yes, yeah, yeah. Elmo, Elmo's willing to be there for comfort, but also solutions oriented. Yeah, we love that for Elmo. But, I think trauma dumping on Elmo feels very Gen Z. It's like, “Yeah, this is what it's like.”
DINGMAN: Well, that is an excellent segue to talk about a Gen Z icon, Chappell Roan, and I thought it'd be interesting to use Chappell Roan as a way of talking a little bit about the return of the parasocial relationship, and a reconsideration of what stars owe to fans and vice versa.
KEHRBERG: So I think Chappell Roan, you've got someone who grew up online with her generation, so you have a whole bunch of content, even makeup tutorials, her teaching you how to do new dances, her talking about singing and the industry, and, and so much of it in that vertical format that mimics the kind of, you know, video format we have when we are actually seeing people's faces just like we might see family that we're FaceTiming with. I think it wasn't surprising that people felt really, really strong relationships to her.
DINGMAN: Well, and this led to fans coming up to her in real life and feeling like there was no boundary and that she really was a friend, somebody they could hug, somebody that they could talk to about their own problems.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, it's unfortunate because I think so much of what we do online is coded with extreme intimacy, both the way that we use rhetoric, about how much we love each other, how iconic everyone is. Like it's just everything is so hyper. And then we go into offline spaces, and that just doesn't translate straight to, “I actually know this person and I can breach this person's physical boundaries.”
DINGMAN: I feel like with Chappell Roan particularly too, because she's so public about queerness, and there's this quote that I found, this is from Megan Duncan, who is a professor of communication at Virginia Tech, and Megan said, “when you have a more niche identity or one that's not everywhere, you certainly are more likely to develop a stronger parasocial relationship with a celebrity by seeing, ‘oh, this person and I share this identity that's minoritized, and therefore I feel that stronger bond because there's fewer of us out there.’” There are fewer, maybe, people in real life where you live to have that kind of powerful urge to find connection.
KEHRBERG: Absolutely. But it also, it has brought up so many important conversations, I think too in the way that Chappell has pushed back on that, and the way that Chappell has pushed back on media's relationship to young women, and there's been a lot of discussion of, “oh, we got to get her some media training.”
But, there's a rawness and rawness and authenticity, I think we forget when we talk about authenticity in the digital age because we're always talking, “authenticity is the best thing ever.” People forget that authenticity is messy. Authenticity makes mistakes. Authenticity is not perfection,
DINGMAN: Unless it's Elmo.
KEHRBERG: Yes. Oh, you're right, you're right, unless it's Elmo.
DINGMAN: Well, speaking of TikTok, so much media consumption continues to drift outside of traditional mainstream sources and voices, but this year, when it comes to TikTok in particular, we saw that really accelerate. These are some numbers from Pew, just to kind of situate us here: 39% of adults under 30 say they regularly get their news there.
KEHRBERG: I think it's that thing again. I'm, it's, it's about relationships, that we are adrift in the sea of information overload, and so, to cut through it, we have to be able to find some people we connect with. And so I think that TikTok delivers such a great platform for people that you feel like you really trust and like and it's very strange. There's kind of an interesting divide now in, did you get your political news this year from long form content sources like podcasts or short form content sources like TikTok?
DINGMAN: Well, yeah, that's fascinating to me that those are the examples that you cited because one of the things that came to mind for me when you were talking about the relationship element is the upsurge in not just the availability of AI, but the use of these large language models to generate content. And there's this product called Notebook LM, that Google makes, that you can put text into a field, and it will generate what I don't think Google uses the word podcast, but in the way it is discussed online a lot, it podcastifies the information that you put into it.
And so I took the liberty before you came in today of asking Notebook LM to generate what they would not call a podcast, but what is often called a podcast, of Sam Dingman from KJZZ and Amanda Keerberg from Cronkite talking about ChatGPT in it's terrible twos, which is a phrase that is often used to describe the current version of it.
And this is what it came up with:
AI “SAM DINGMAN”: OK, so, today we're going to take this deep dive into something that feels like, you know, it's straight out of science fiction, and that is the rise of these large language models and how they're changing the game for content creation and maybe even how we think.
AI “AMANDA KEHRBERG”: For sure.
AI “SAM DINGMAN”: It's kind of wild when you think about it, right? We're talking about how to not sound like a bot.
AI “AMANDA KEHRBERG”: Right?
DINGMAN: That already is so strange. That is a bot talking about how it doesn't want to sound like a bot, but it gets really strange a little bit further out.
AI “AMANDA KEHRBERG”: You know, it's funny because I was just reading this article about —
AI “SAM DINGMAN”: Yeah, you sent over some interesting research on this. I was really curious to get your take on it.
DINGMAN: One thing that really struck me, so what I find fascinating about that is this imaginary set of beings, has just posited this universe where research was exchanged, but there was no research. And if you keep listening to this, they will then start to opine on the information that was contained in this “research” that these two robots emailed about.
KEHRBERG: But the research doesn't exist. I think the thing that I'm obsessed with now is there have been so many articles this week and Like this month about how to alter your writing to sound less like ChatGPT. And they've said things like, “Stop using em dashes. Stop using verbs that end in -ing,” words like you know amplifying, maximizing, optimizing, you know. And I am slightly horrified by the idea that we're going to change the way we speak as humans to differentiate ourselves as humans, but I think that's impossible because these models will just be trained on the new way we talk. They'll begin to talk like that and then we'll have to change the way we talk again. So yeah, we can't, we can't outrun that. I, yeah, I don't know. I think we're gonna, we're going to tread some weird paths.
