Social media these days can feel like anything but organic. Our feeds are carefully curated — not by us, but by sophisticated algorithms that somehow know that you are a fan of Taylor Swift, you have a dog that likes squeaky toys and you’re worried about climate change.
They know us better than we know ourselves.
But Amanda Kehrberg, a Ph.D. student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, says there is one place left on the internet that is still pure — or, at least more pure and hints at the utopian free exchange of ideas that its original founders were looking for.
Kehrberg studies digital culture and joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
GILGER: I remember when social media was actually about your social life, right? Like it was about posting pictures of who you went to the bars with and the meals you ate and like everything was chronological. You remember this?
KEHRBER: Oh, absolutely. And there was no curation like you would go out one evening and you would post 87 pictures the next day. This was before we all had to learn to become event photographers just to live our own lives.
GILGER: And it was about who you're friends with and what they're doing.
KEHRBER: Yeah, it was so focused on like, we talked a lot about the divide between the online life and the in-person life because so much of our online life initially we'd gone through this sort of era of anonymity, but when social media started, it really became about taking our offline life into an online representation of it and really using that to show kind of what our our real lives looked like.
GILGER: Yeah. So I'm sure some of that had to do with the fact that we were young and in college. But social media has fundamentally changed since then too, even for kids who are in college now.
And today the companies and the people who are running social media sites and maybe just the political environment in general have made social media a much more political and polarized place, like much of society.
KEHRBER: Yeah, absolutely. Originally, these algorithmic feeds were very much designed around your ego network and what we see now is that it ended up shifting to, really what TikTok came about and did this so incredibly well, is a taste algorithm. So that it's less about who you're connected to and who they know and more about how your tastes reflect what kind of person you are.
Which is why everybody then gets on TikTok during the pandemic and starts to go, “How do they know that I have like 2b curly hair, and that I'm an environmental activist,” because TikTok would look at, the kinds of videos that you're watching and go like, “Oh, this person likes cross stitching, this person probably also likes frogs,” and you'd be like, “I mean, I do like frogs. How did you know that?”
GILGER: They know you better than you do.
KEHRBER: Absolutely, but the thing about both types is that both of them are putting you into silos without even your knowledge or your active curation. And that means that not only are you seeing people you know, who think like you and taste that makes sense for someone who thinks like you, you're just getting more and more ensconced in these algorithmic bubbles, which of course we've seen is one of the reasons Bluesky has started to take off is that people are pushing back on that.
GILGER: Right, but Bluesky is also a good example of polarization in a way, right? Because we saw Elon Musk buy Twitter and lots of people on the left end of the political spectrum say, “I'm not going to be on this site. I'm going to be on Bluesky.”
So it's self-selecting, but you're also saying that it's way more than that. This has been selected for you in many ways.
KEHRBER: Oh, absolutely, yeah, that's how Facebook found out that say what prompts engagement is outrage. Research has actually shown that essentially what most prompts us to get involved, talk back, press some buttons is what they call “big if true”. The problem with that is the if true part.
GILGER: OK, so you are here to make an argument for one particular social media platform that you think maybe hasn't fallen to this trope, which is Reddit. I'm not an avid Reddit user, but you're going to show me a little bit about what this looks like and how it works, and it's pretty old school, right? That's the idea.
KEHRBER: Yes, it's very old school. It is so lively and vibrant and silly and serious at the same time. It has its own cultural norms that can really kind of upset traditional structures. I mean, think of Woody Harrelson coming on to do an Ask Me Anything and not understanding that the vibe was very serious about anything.
He just keeps trying to go like, “let's take it back to Rampart”, which was the movie he was promoting at the time. And this has become a meme on Reddit of like, “can we get this conversation back to Rampart?” Because the idea that you can interact on a platform like Reddit in these kind of traditional authority controlled information type ways is nonsense.
And so I think Reddit really speaks to the idea of this kind of culture of free exchange of info that we get from both the hacker culture and the kind of hippie culture.
GILGER: And it hasn't lost this today?
KEHRBER: I don't think it has. Has it dissipated? I would say absolutely. Yes. But it gives you the opportunity to not just curate, you know, they call it the front page of the internet, which was, I think, a wonderful play on the idea that everyone everywhere all at once is upvoting or downvoting content to create the front page, which is sort of beautiful metaphor for this kind of upset to gatekeeping.
I think Reddit has so much potential to make space for that in a way that's really, really beautiful, but also includes cats and at every turn and silliness.
GILGER: But it gets back to that almost utopian idea, right, that the original founders of the internet had. I wonder what you think about the broader question this all brings up, right? Like, what do we want out of our social media platforms? Like what are we trying to get?
KEHRBER: Oh, that is such a complicated question because I think one of the reasons that Reddit still has so much value is that they kept the anonymity that none of our other social media platforms have, and I think that there's so much to be said about the way that kind of celebrity culture has really influenced the way that we interact on social media.
That we've all sort of become these mini micro celebrities in the sense of the way that we are curating our own images and our own brands. And I think that Reddit's ability to allow us to deliberate partly does function on the fact that we're not so focused on being our own tiny versions of celebrities there. And I think there's value to that.
I think there's value to making a joke that a lot of people upvote in that moment, but that is kind of ephemeral, that it's not important that you're going to get more followers just because you made a great joke or that you're building your brand, yeah.
But that said, I am really interested in what Bluesky is doing, but Bluesky is proposing a marketplace of algorithms. So there are still algorithms, but there are choices you're making about how they'll structure the information that you get. I think that's a really interesting idea.
If you think back to You know, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Milton Mill and this marketplace of ideas and the idea that like we have these spaces like the Greek agora where everybody's sort of like shouting ideas and when these ideas all clash together, truth emerges. I think we've lost our belief in that.
Particularly before those ideas have a chance to clash, the algorithm is curating your access to just one of them over the other. So I think that if there is a way to sort of choose some golden mean between the two extremes of this perfect sort of you only see things that make you comfortable. You'll only see things that confirm your existing biases and just the information overload onslaught that none of us can really exist in comfortably. I think that would be really great.
GILGER: Amanda Kehrber, Ph.D. student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She studies digital culture, as you can tell. Amanda, thank you so much as always.
KEHRBER: Thank you.
