Life in the New Media Landscape

gnovis Journal • Spring 2015 • Volume XVI, Issue 2

Life in the New Media landscape:

Ritual Communication and Distributed Cognition on Reddit

Chris Miller Georgetown University

Abstract

The New Media landscape is diverse and complex. More importantly, as noted by Lev Manovich, it is fundamentally new. This paper will explore one instance of New Media, the social news site reddit, in terms of several theoretical frameworks, situating the site both in terms of its historical precedents and novel contributions to the New Media landscape. The analysis will show that the affordances of New Media embodied in reddit, including expansions on Ritual Communication and Distributed Cognition, along with a Web 2.0 ethos that highly values interactivity and user-control, have made reddit a site of 21st century community building.

“. . . life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.“ -J.C.R. Licklider, 1968

as an ahistorical black box. Those who work in the Ivory Towers of computer science and engi- neering that have the technical knowhow to do t can be difficult to glance back over the such work have been traditionally disinterested past 100 years and not see some magic, in the imperfections and nuances of humanity some dramatic, unprecedented leap for- I and sociality (although Brian Arthur has signifi- ward into the future-present. But when a tech- cantly changed the tone of the discourse in that nology and all its component parts are exam- regard). Moreover, a lack of interdisciplinar- ined, or when one encounters a document like ity in the academy makes it difficult for those Licklider’s “The Computer as Communication without a background in technology (i.e. so- Device,” it can be equally difficult not to see cial scientists) to conduct an inquiry from their a road that could have only led to this exact own respective intellectual perspectives. How- point. ever, as more and more human interactions are The truth is certainly neither, but some- mediated by technology (both hardware - com- where in between. Understanding where a puters and phones - and software - email and given technology’s production and use lies on websites), it becomes increasingly important to that spectrum, between immaculate invention engage in this social aspect of technology. and deterministic inevitability, will provide important insights into the affordances and limi- There is no shortage of examples of digi- tations of that technology. tal sociality; many of the most dramatic suc- This type of inquiry is all too often ignored cess stories of the past ten years in technologi- in favor of evaluations that treat a technology cal innovation have come from social network-

1 gnovis Journal • Spring 2015 • Volume XVI, Issue 2 ing sites like Facebook and Twitter. However, In either case, we need to ﬁnd out the ways individuals interact online is not lim- soon.” - Howard Rheingold, 1993 ited to Likes and 140—character quips. Recent years have seen the rise in popularity of other The basic elements of reddit can be quickly models of digital sociality. Forums, “social explained to any digitally literate individual news” websites, and user—content hosts have today: registered site members submit content, been a breeding ground for different types of either in the form of text hosted by reddit or online communities, ones that more closely re- a link to externally hosted content (images, semble Licklider’s vision above. videos, articles, etc.), which is then voted on The website reddit is one such space. Orig- by the user community. Submissions that re- inally conceived of as a social news site, ceive the most votes move to the top of the the “Front Page of the Internet,” reddit has “front page,” the home page of reddit that all emerged as one of the most populated spaces users (members and non-member “lurkers”) for digital sociality on the web today. While ﬁrst see. Many of these submissions are origi- a full analysis of this dense social space is be- nally posted to “sub-reddits,” which are user- yond the scope of this research, several key created, topic-oriented sub—sites (for example features of the site will be analyzed in a histor- reddit.com/r/patriots for fans of the New Eng- ical context and in comparison with contem- land Patriots football team). Enough votes on a porary websites that offer similar affordances. sub-reddit will eventually lead to a post reach- Reddit represents a public space for cultural ing the front page. mediation and re—mediation, wherein the curation of cultural artifacts by users provides a means for distributed cognition and cultural transmission that inherently lends itself toward community building. These characteristics are not unique to reddit, historically or currently. However, in combination with a fuller realization of the potential affordances of the web medium and shared cultural values of users and site managers, reddit offers an insightful view into modern digital sociality and potentially into the future of Internet communities. Figure 1: /r/patriots, The sub-reddit for the New Eng- I. Introduction:A brief land Patriots — www.reddit.com/r/patriots, explanation and history of reddit accessed 12/15/2014

“Perhaps cyberspace is one of the While the website has undergone some informal public places where peo- signiﬁcant changes since it launched in 2005 ple can rebuild the aspects of com- (including the addition of user-created sub- munity that were lost when the reddits), the core of reddit as a content aggre- malt shop became a mall. Or per- gator based on user-generated/discovered con- haps cyberspace is precisely the tent has remained the same, as has the website wrong place to look for the rebirth administrator’s commitment to a user-oriented of community, offering not a tool design (1). Most importantly, the population of for conviviality but a life-denying the site has exploded from 700,000 page views simulacrum of real passion and a month (this includes repeated viewings by true commitment to one another. individual users) in 2006 to 112 million unique

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views per month in 2014 (Singel 2011, Singer categories organized by topic, and the sense of 2014). According to web-based Internet an- community inherent in this site are all echoed alytic tool Alexa.com, reddit is the 9th most in reddit and other modern sites. popular website in the U.S. as of December One of the most significant features com- 2014. mon to the WELL and reddit is the idea of a Many of reddit’s theoretical antecedents self-governed community that was designed date back to the earliest days of computer sci- by the users. The structure of these sites as ence. The hypertext links which are at the self-governed and user-designed contributes core of reddit’s interface have a history dat- significantly to the sense of community in both ing back to Vannevar Bush’s vision of the spaces. Rheingold (1993) gives a valuable ac- “memex,” which he first postulated in 1945 (see count of life in the WELL in its earliest days, Bush 1945). In 1968, Doug Engelbart fleshed when the community was such a size that one out this vision of hypertext in the now infa- could feasibly know the entire user population mous “Mother of All Demos,” in which he (700 in 1985, up to 3000 in 1988). The scene also showcased many of the other technolo- that he depicts is one of a caring, deeply per- gies we now use to access sites like reddit, sonal community, with relationships that orig- including the graphical “window” interface inated in cyberspace but easily transitioned and the mouse(2). In that same year, Lick- into the real world. Rheingold suggests that lider recounted one of the earliest instances of the WELL functioned as what Oldenburg (1997- computer mediated human interaction at a con- originally printed in 1989) calls a Third Space: ference hosted by Engelbart. Drawing on this a public space separate from the home and the event, Licklider went on to write “The Com- work place in which community norms and puter as Communication Device,” (1968) in values can be established. Similarly, Milner which he painted a now-familiar picture of ge- sites Habermas’ notion of the “Public Sphere” ographically disparate “communities of inter- as a key reference for the interpretation of in- est,” a term that seems like it could have been ternet “memes,”(Milner 2013, Habermas 1991- written specifically to describe sub-reddits. originally printed 1962). “Memes,” whether Accepting that there is not time here to specific to a particular website or used across describe in detail the history of digital social- platforms, represent a commonly used, widely ity from Bush and Licklider all the way to understood concept in the same way a cliché present (and knowing that it has been done might be common throughout a linguistic cul- elsewhere, see Porter 2007 and Kollock and ture. Smith 2002), there are a few important precur- This is relevant not only as a tie between sors that should be noted. The Whole Earth the WELL and modern sites like reddit, but as ’Lectronic Link, more commonly known as a distinguishing feature between reddit and so- the WELL, might be considered the common cial networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. ancestor of many modern forum-based web Where reddit’s “front page” is the same for all sites. Turner describes the WELL, which was users, a Facebook user’s home page is entirely founded in 1985, as a “teleconferencing system” customized to the user, with visible posts lim- that subscribers could access and “type mes- ited to those submitted by the user’s “Friends,” sages to one another in either asynchronous (reddit’s front page does vary somewhat for or real-time conversations,” (Turner 2008, p. members who can choose to “subscribe” to 141). Turner’s account delves into the social certain sub-reddits, but it still features submis- history of the site, explaining how it emerged sions common to all subscribers of that par- from the curious pairing of military research ticular sub-reddit). Posts common to reddit’s scientists and ’60s/’70s era counter-culture en- front page “. . . go on to form the basis of dis- trepreneurs like Stewart Brand. This mix of cussions between users, and can be thought ideologies and technology, the format of sub- of as defining the website’s identity,” (Mills

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2009), and for a website that is constructed en- as photos from individuals in Boston found on tirely of user contributions, the “identity” of sites like Facebook and Twitter. 4Chan users al- the website translates directly to that of the most immediately began actively searching for user community. the suspects by comparing photos and descrip- This is not to say that there are no other tions reported by the news media. Pictures modern digital media that provide a social quickly emerged with crudely drawn arrows space on which users can interact. One such that suggested potential suspects. increasingly important category of spaces that cannot be covered here is that of an online game. Studies into online game communities, like those by Boellstorff (2010) and Nardi (2010) feature a number of themes that are echoed in this paper, and an extended comparison of games and websites as virtual spaces may offer interesting insights into online identity and community building. My focus on forum-sites will hopefully provide a sufﬁcient grounding for the study of websites as signif- Figure 3: Above: Image originally posted on icant community building spaces. Excluding 4Chan.org, re-posted to infowars.com – topic-speciﬁc fora (Slashdot being one notable http://www.infowars.com/boston-bombing- example, founded in 1997 with a focus on com- culprits-found/, accessed 2/5/2014 puter coding, which was also one of the earliest sub-reddit topics), sites like 4chan and Digg The earliest “coverage” by reddit was pri- are just two examples of sites structurally simi- marily updates on the situation from news me- lar to reddit. However, the structures vary in dia and social networks. However, soon af- subtle but important ways, and the result is ter this, a user created a “FindBostonBombers” fundamentally different communities on each sub-reddit that used the same sort of crude vig- site. ilante investigation as 4Chan. When a group of users began attempting to identify individuals in the photographs and posted these “suspects”’ personal information (a strict violation of reddit’s rules) the sub-reddit was shut down. At this point, some of this information had already been picked up by national news media, and the entire event proved embarrassing for reddit’s administrators and much of the larger reddit community. Figure 2: Above: the WELL, 4Chan, and Digg— an Potts and Harrison use this event as a com- ecosystem of online places. www.well.com, mon theme by which to measure their rhetori- www.4chan.org, www.digg.com, all accessed cal analyses of reddit and 4Chan. Their results 12/15/2014 illustrate the ways in which subtle differences in the structure of an interface affect the culture In a study on how two of these commu- of a mediated community, and in turn how the nities, reddit and 4Chan, reacted to the 2013 tone of a community will, over time, shape Boston marathon bombing, Potts and Harri- the structure of the interface, an especially son (2013) illuminate some of their differences. valid observation in the case of sites like reddit Both sites reacted to the bombing almost imme- that emphasize open-source, user-centric de- diately, posting news media coverage as well velopment. 4Chan’s near-total anonymity and

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chaotic thread structure supports a culture of “bury” or down-vote posts was removed com- “anonymity and ephemerality” (Bernstein et al pletely (Slattery 2010). Reddit, on the other 2011), which meant no accountability for those hand, has consistently updated users on site posting names of “suspects” and no visible re- developments and accepted user input on web- morse on the site after those “suspects” were site changes (see Martin 2011 on reddit’s “spin cleared. Reddit, on the other hand, fosters the out” from parent company Conde Nast). development of user identity (by the use of per- Digg’s disastrous v4 launch offers an inter- manent screen names and member association esting view at how a top-down restructuring of with various sub-reddits) and cultural history; a website, and the inherent value changes that the individuals responsible for the FindBoston- such a restructuring entailed, led to the disper- Bombers sub-reddit were publicly chastised by sal of a community. The fact that the exodus other users for violating the culture of reddit by away from Digg was a significant contributor being so shortsighted and ignoring the conse- to reddit’s success (Metz 2012) illustrates the quences of their actions. (Another more casual importance of a design oriented towards user- comparison of cultures of 4chan and reddit can generated content and self-governance, a value be seen in Stryker 2010, which displays differ- set that reddit administrators have repeatedly ent responses to an online bully: 4chan posted emphasized. They have accomplished this by the bully’s address and social network profiles, regularly updating users on site changes with an overt call for real world retribution, while blog posts and active participation in reddit de- reddit set up a donation fund for the victim’s bates (see Martin 2011 and Wong 2012). In family). addition, instead of relying solely on tradi- Reddit’s immediate popular predecessor tional advertising-based revenue, reddit has and longtime competitor is digg.com, which introduced programs like reddit gold, which was originally very similar to reddit, both cul- allows users to pay a yearly subscription for turally and structurally, with required screen an upgraded membership. In a blog post, CEO names for submissions and a voting sys- Yishan Wong praised Gold members for em- tem (“diggs” opposed to “upvotes”). Digg, bracing the program, which “allowed us to run founded in 2004, maintained popular success a site backed by its community rather than over reddit for years until the now infamous catering primarily to advertisers,” (Wong 2012). Digg version 4 update in 2010, which resulted These values are further expanded on by red- in a “Mass Exodus” from the site (3), a move- dit’s emphasis on transparency and accessibil- ment that led many Digg users (including the ity, which was fully realized in 2008 when the author) to reddit. There are undeniably a va- site’s code was “open-sourced,” meaning al- riety of factors contributing to this “exodus” most all of the code running the site was made including v4’s buggy design and a more com- visible to the public (Steve 2008). Additions or plex layout. A more theoretically interesting changes to the code could, from that point on, reason is that, according to reddit co-founder be made by anyone and submitted to reddit Steve Huffman , the v4 update represented a administrators for consideration. (4) shift in tone by website administrators that was (An interesting study would be to look at not in line with user expectations (Metz 2012). reddit’s source code over time and track the The update was a top-down change in values changes that are made, especially if one could that shifted the platform from a standalone site determine the origin of each of those changes. to one closely tied with social network sites How often is user-generated code adopted by (which, as already described, are significantly the site?) different in nature). The front page of Digg was In terms of digital sociality, it is clear that suddenly populated by a suspicious number reddit is not alone as a potential venue. It is of posts from a few popular publishers, and in the product of both a technological and a soci- a brazen breach of user agency, the ability to ological heritage, and it currently resides in an

5 gnovis Journal • Spring 2015 • Volume XVI, Issue 2 ecosystem of other sites, each with their own changes, has substantial impact on the “mes- respective community and value set. It is also sage” itself and how it is interpreted, i.e. hu- clear that reddit has some particular features or man communication. As Manovich says, “Soft- particular combinations of features that have ware has become our interface to the world, to contributed to its success over the past 10 years. others, to our memory and our imagination-a What’s left to do now is to focus more closely universal language through which the world on these peculiarities of reddit. By utilizing a speaks, and a universal engine on which the set of interdisciplinary theoretical foundations, world runs,” (ibid. p. 2). He goes on to care- I hope to offer several explanations of reddit’s fully describe several instances of New Me- functionality that have contributed to its suc- dia, pointing out that yes, many functions of cess. New Media, specifically software, do recreate or “simulate” Old Media. This is at the core of Bolter and Grusin’s previous explanation of II. Theoretical grounding: “New” Media, in which they argued that digital Mediation and Distributed media are simply “refashioned and improved Agencies versions of other media” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 15). However, as Manovich argues, this “. . . computers and software are not “refashioning” and “improvement” on Old Me- just ‘technology’ but rather the new dia often represent changes dramatic enough medium in which we can think and to constitute fundamentally different processes imagine differently.” at work when New Media is utilized. -Lev Manovich, 2013, p. 13 If we accept that software as an interface has a significant impact on human communi- Thankfully, the notion of studying media and cation and cognition and that it is sufficiently technology as cultural interfaces is by no means distinct from Old Media, then we must start novel, and so the literature available is exten- outlining the characteristics of New Media and sive. One of the most valuable recent contribu- what their potential affordances and limitations tions is Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Com- might be. This question is deeply tied to the mand (2013), which issues a call to arms for the origins of New Media, what Manovich calls nascent field of Software Studies, the ancestry the “secret history of our software culture,”(p. of which dates back to the Media Ecologists of 5). Understanding how and why these New the mid-20th century. While Manovich served Media are created is crucial to understanding as the primary inspiration for this research on their impacts. reddit, the breadth and complexity of the topic This goal is not as simple as phoning the calls for an interdisciplinary approach that uti- creators of reddit and asking why they decided lizes tools from a variety of origins. Research to make the up-vote button orange and the and theories from Communication Studies and down-vote button blue. In a previous work, Cognitive Science will also be included in my Manovich noted the “fractal structure of New discussion of reddit as a cultural mediator. Media,” (Manovich 2001). Because New Me- A key argument of Manovich’s book is that dia is built on digital technology, it shares New Media is, in fact, new. While this may many characteristics with the technology it- seem unsurprising or worse, inconsequential, self, including this “fractal” structure, by which the newness of New Media is of the utmost im- Manovich meant to allude to its recursive, dis- portance when couched in terms of the history crete composition. This view can be signifi- of Media Studies. If “The Medium is the Mes- cantly expanded with Arthur’s more general sage,” then whether a novel medium is simply definitions of technology. In his book The Na- a reiteration of an old medium or actually an it- ture of Technology (2009), Arthur notes the eration, a version with significantly meaningful recursive, discrete (or “modular”) nature of

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technology, but he also valuably emphasizes “original”? Moreover, the construction of red- combinatoriality. By calling technology “com- dit, both in terms of cultural identity and the binatorial,” Arthur means to illustrate that all material code, is not the product of the efforts technologies are composed of previously avail- of a few individuals reddit’s open-source code able technologies his example is of a jet engine, means it is “physically” constructed by the en- which could not have been invented until all tire community of users and administrators, of its component parts had already been in- and its high level of interactivity means the vented. Moreover, each of those component “social construction” is equally communal (see parts is built on other technologies- technology, the section on Ritual Communication below). in this way, is recursive. This means that when How can we start thinking about what affor- evaluating a technology, be it a jet engine or dances are offered by this style of construction, a website, we cannot look at the final product and which various agencies are interacting that and see only a “black box.” We must inquire make the site’s success possible? into the component parts and also evaluate These questions will be explored in the next their affordances and limitations. two sections, in which specific attention will be This “de-Black Boxing” effort is made in- paid to how reddit affords cultural transmis- finitely more important when Bruno Latour’s sion and distributed cognition. theory of Distributed Agency is taken into account (Latour 1994). In a now classic inquiry into “technical mediation,” Latour examines III. Culture building:Mediated the ways in which technology interacts with ritual communication the user, not as a passive tool but as an “ac- tant” (the implications of this will be explored “Creative, interactive communica- further in the section below on distributed cog- tion requires a plastic or moldable nition). Perhaps most relevant to the discus- medium that can be modeled, a dy- sion here, which is centered on cultural com- namic medium in which premises munication, is Latour’s idea that a technology will flow into consequences, and can act as a “delegate of its enunciator,” by above all a common medium that which he means that the technology takes on can be contributed to and experi- the agency of its creator. His example is of the mented with by all.” quiet speed bump, which, in interacting with -J.C.R. Licklider, 1968 a driver, seems to express a will the will of the speed bump installer who wants drivers to Again, Licklider’s premonitions are almost slow down. In turn, the structure (“will” or eerie. It is as if he foresaw the coming domina- “agency”) of the speed bump determines how it tion of the computational technology market is installed. The actants in this example include by a few key players and was already speak- the speed bump installer, the driver, and, of ing out against it. This interactivity that he course, the speed bump, all “in the process of suggests, the ability to “contribute to” and “ex- exchanging competences, offering one another periment with” the medium, is at the core of new possibilities, new goals, new functions.” the current “open-source software” movement, To place all this in terms of reddit clearly, which has its roots in much of the ideology of reddit is an instance of New Media, a software Licklider and his contemporaries like Alan Kay, interface through which individuals can inter- as well as in the ’70s counter-culture of Stewart act indirectly, via content, and directly, through Brand that resulted in the WELL. This value of comments and private messages. The question self-governance and user-generated content is then becomes what is it about the design of red- crucial to the community and social aspect of dit that makes it distinct, while acknowledging a virtual space, and is expressed in a number that none of its component parts are necessarily of features of reddit.

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Reddit’s slogan, “the front page of the communication, just not vice versa). This evo- internet,” directly associates reddit with the lution from “Front page to self-referential com- quintessentially Old Media printed newspaper. munity” (Singer et al. 2014) has been driven in Some current research seemingly confirms this part because of the nature of the public “front comparison in finding that motivations for us- page,” but also by the interactive, self-governed ing reddit were primarily informational, not aspect of the site. social (Bogers and Werner 2014). Alternate The ability for users to post content, orig- analysis and theoretical framing of this data, inal or otherwise, is the primary feature of however, offers very different results. Even if the website. This in itself is incredibly signifi- reddit only offered the ability to communicate cant in terms of community building if Carey’s information (which it is not limited to), there newspaper front page serves as a locus for cul- are nuanced theories of communication that tural identity via ritual communication, what illustrate how that simple act can quickly lead happens when literally anyone can be the jour- to something beyond simple communication nalist? Although much of what was originally community. posted to the site was links to externally hosted In an important contribution to Communi- content, often not created by the user, Singer cations Studies, Carey separates communica- et al. note that since the siteâA˘ Zs´ inception tion into two categories: transmission and “rit- “self” posts, or text content hosted by reddit ual communication,” (Carey 1989). The former itself, have become increasingly common (ibid). is the more common definition of communica- Even “reposts,” content that has already been tion, that is, to impart a message. It is in the lat- posted to the site by other users, and unorigi- ter view that a more interesting notion emerges nal content that makes the front page goes on the idea that shared information, like that on to become the topic of further discussion and the front page of a newspaper, contributes remix by other users in what Milner calls “Pop to the identity of the community. “Commu- Polyvocality” (Mills 2011, Milner 2013). nication,” says Carey, “is a symbolic process This level of interactivity is emblematic of whereby reality is produced, maintained, re- Manovich’s idea that New Media is fundamen- paired and transformed,” (p. 8). A crucial tally New. Reddit’s metaphorical status as the element of this, again building on Oldenburg “front page” of the internet does not really re- and Habermas before him, is that the commu- late it in any meaningful way to a newspaper’s nication must be public, shared amongst an front page any more than the internet is related entire community. Debray adds an interesting to the newspaper. A newspaper’s consumers element here as well in his discussion of cul- are distinctly separated from its producers. On tural transmission (the terminology here being reddit, many of the consumers are also the obnoxiously at odds with Carey). Debray uses producers (or discoverers) of content. This fea- the word transmission to talk about the pass- ture is emblematic of the ethos of Web 2.0 as ing of cultural information, or what essentially “the ether through which interactivity happens,” amounts to cultural heritage. This, Debray says, distinguishing modern sites as significantly dif- requires some sort of technological mediation: ferent than even their immediate predecessor for “communication” to become “transmission” the static, un-touchable sites of Web 1.0 (DiN- it must be materially embodied (Debray 2004). ucci 1999). Blog posts, music hosting sites, and That “material” is inherently technical, be it a podcasts are, like reddit, instances of the move Bible or a blog post. towards user-generated content. This is all to say that what happens on red- The ability to comment on articles is sim- dit is not “just” information being transmitted ilarly an important feature that distinguishes if it ever was, it has evolved beyond that (both New Media from Old, and is common through- Carey and Debray allow for simple communica- out New Media. Even the online versions tion to contribute to culturally significant ritual of most newspapers often allow commenting.

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The particular style of “threads” of comments, website themselves, rather than leaving it up though, is by no means universal, and is es- to anonymous, invisible editors (reddit users pecially well-suited to discussion and debate, commonly refer to themselves as “redditors,” rather than simply “commentary.” The ability i.e. reddit’s editors). of users to communicate with the author as This model certainly pre-dated reddit Digg well as each other is another important means utilized the same functionality with “Digg” by which community is built online. The fact and “Bury” buttons. But as noted above, Digg that these conversations are preserved and ac- famously removed the “Bury” function in the cessible throughout time means each conver- version 4 update, limiting user agency and sation thread becomes a materially embodied their ability to “curate” effectively. This viola- cultural marker of the type that Debray alluded tion of user “rights” was a contributing factor to. Rheingold describes threaded conversations to the “Mass Exodus” that led many users to on the WELL as “. . . a long, topical cocktail reddit. Along with an important lesson in in- party you can rewind back to the beginning to terface design and the ethics of business on the find out who said what before you got there,” internet, this incident illustrates the power of (Rheingold 1993). Moreover, the content of the newness of New Media. If users consumed these comment threads often polices member New Media the same way that they consumed behavior. As mentioned above, Potts and Har- Old Media, there should not have been an is- rison note that in the face of a controversial re- sue with Digg’s front page being dominated action to a national event, the rhetoric of users by a few “power users” and corporate entities. and site administrators reified reddit’s estab- Moreover the loss of the ability to curate the lished norms. Even “trolling,” the posting of front page may have raised a few eyebrows, “erroneous or inflammatory information with but through an Old Media lens, one could not the intention of provoking a strong reaction have predicted the mass exodus that it led to. out of other users,” often serves the purpose However, if Digg and reddit are understood as of reifying norms through humor, reminding fundamentally NEW media, the results would veteran members of agreed upon facts or stan- have been obvious; interactivity and increased dards and informing less experienced users agency are two key elements of Web 2.0. Red- (often by mocking them) (Merrit 2012). dit’s structure embraces these characteristics The last important structural component through user-submitted content, threaded com- of reddit that significantly contributes to the ment sections, and voting. This is further con- site’s nature as a place for ritual communica- tributed to by factors mentioned above like tion is the voting system. As mentioned in the ability for users to create sub-reddits, ef- passing above, reddit members have the ability fectively starting their own sub-communities, to “upvote” and “downvote” posts as well as and the open-sourced code of the site. Those comments on posts. Links and comments with last two factors (which will be explored further more votes are given higher visibility, either below) mean that not only is that site a space moving “up” on a page or higher in a comment for multiple forms of interaction and commu- thread. (Link-posters and commenters receive nication that build the identity of the site and “Karma” for each upvote received a more full its community, but that users literally build exploration of the significance of Karma to red- the site. This is a realization of Licklider’s vi- dit users in terms of community participation sion of a “medium that can be contributed to would be a worthwhile study). Mills noted that and experimented with by all.” In Latour’s this functionality allows “a very large number terminology, reddit is a cultural artifact with of people (to) participate in a discussion with- many “enunciators,” meaning that its appear- out it becoming so large and diffuse that it is ance, functionality, and the agencies embodied difficult to make sense of,” (ibid). Moreover, within it are largely a result of the user-base, in using this tool, users essentially curate the rather than a few, top level administrators.

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IV. Thinking Online:Distributed some of his cognition (in this case, memory) Cognition into the notebook, the notebook effectively becomes part of Otto’s cognitive loop (Clark and “We refer to a way of life in an Chalmers 1998, reprinted in Clark 2010). That integrated domain where hunches, is to say that the notebook, at that moment, is cut-and-try, intangibles, and the hu- not just an aid separate from cognition but part man ‘feel for a situation’ usefully of the cognitive process. Hutchins was another co-exist with powerful concepts, early contributor to this notion that human streamlined terminology and no- cognition might not be entirely “Brainbound,” tation, sophisticated methods and (Clark’s term). Hutchins’ focus, though, was high-powered electronic aids.” not just on technology, but on human interactions as mediated by technology (Hutchins -Doug Engelbart, 1968 (re-printed 1996). Both notions will be important in think- in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort ing about how reddit uses New Media affor- 2003) dances to achieve distributed cognition. A common joke/critique of reddit amongst As one of the founding fathers of computer its user-base is that of the “reddit hive mind,” science and the inventor of various computa- (Mills 2011). This terminology means to sug- tional technologies (including the mouse, the gest that reddit is artificially of one voice, that “window” and hypertext), Engelbart’s idea that the voting and comment system make it so that computers should be used to “Augment Hu- only majority opinions are heard. This is not in man Intellect” was extremely influential. Only line with the self-established values of the site recently, though, has this idea been taken to the “reddiquette” guide, a user-informed set the next level: that computational technolo- of loose rules for use of the site (that are only gies might serve not only as a cognitive aid, rarely enforced by site administrators), states but as a part of the cognitive process. Along that users should “moderate based on qual- with acting as a site for community building, ity, not opinion,” meaning submissions should reddit acts as one such cognitive artifact that not be down-voted only because the voter dis- individuals and groups of users can think not agrees with the content (5). The common senti- with but through. While this simple fact does ment is that this rule is largely ignored. not distinguish reddit from Old Media or even other instances of New Media, it is important to explore how this distributed cognition plays out in this specific setting and how it relates to other distinct features already discussed. The theories of cognition developed by Andy Clark and Edwin Hutchins over the past 15 years have served as a dramatic step in a new direction. Although working separately, Clark, Hutchins and a handful of other cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind have expanded on the ideas of media ecologists - that a communication is highly influenced by Figure 4: Above: From reddit’s frontpage on 12/5/14, the medium - by positing that even in “per- captioned “Found some Redditors in Pokemon,” sonal communication,” that is communication — http://i.imgur.com/vCmQpJw.jpg accesssed with one’s self (or simply cognition), a physical 12/5/14 medium can play an important role. Clark’s famous example is of Otto, the Alzheimer’s However, in his study from 2011, Mills patient, and his notebook. By “offloading” found that although minority opinions were

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not as visible as majority opinions simply by tity online, which is generally thought to be nature of not receiving as many votes, they an unrestricted process, is in fact heavily hege- were not totally marginalized. If nothing else, monically influenced. Although this is meant reddit affords its users the ability to create a as a critique of this particular cultural artifact, sub-reddit for people who share a potentially it also validates the claim that these sub-reddits unpopular view. Further, Mills found that one represent a sufficiently distinct space in which of the primary functions of the voting system, a distinct sub-culture, complete with its own rather than simply eliminating minority voices, hegemony, can form. was, as the title of his article suggests, “a Col- lective Intelligence Approach to Information Overload.” That is to say that the curation of front page content by users is similar to the way Otto might organize his notebook, jotting down the most important (or valuable or hu- morous or. . . ) information in the front and less important information in subsequent pages. The difference here is obviously that, on reddit, it is a group of people all contributing to this process. So here we can see how the community shaping aspect of the front page is added to by the process of distributed cognition not only are front page posts an example of ritual communication, but they are the result of a massive cognitive loop through which many thousands of users do the processing work that no individual could do alone. Figure 5: Above: A “map”of reddit’s virtual space. This feature of reddit is, again, a reiteration Clicking a sub—reddit will draw lines of a structure already made popular by Digg. between common “cross—posts” (con- Reddit added to this cognitive functionality by tent posted by one user under multiple pairing it with a sub-category system based sub-reddits) with other sub-reddits — http://redditstuff.github.io/sna/vizit/WTF on that of the WELL and other early forum accessed 4:00 p.m., 12/14/2014 sites. Reddit also upgraded this sub-category or “thread” system in an interesting way instead of having a conversation thread hosted as This spatial aspect illustrates a different a sub-page of the host site, sub-reddits are dis- type of cognitive distribution. Sub-reddits af- tinctly separate places. Each sub-reddit, set up ford the cognitive community of reddit the ca- by an individual user, has its own set of rules, pacity to not just organize information in terms its own iconography (most sub-reddits have a of “good” or “bad” by voting up or down. In- logo that plays off of the reddit alien logo), its stead, they can organize it into different “piles” own particular lexicon (which can sometimes of information. This is precisely what Hol- be adopted by the larger reddit community) lan, Hutchins, and Kirsh describe as individu- – in short, its own culture. En et al. (2013) als “using space to encode ordering informa- offer a post-modern critique of sidebar text of tion,” and thus “off-loading memory,” (Hollan, sub-reddits, which is where sub-reddit creators Hutchins and Kirsh 2000, p. 191), only here the often provide a description of the sub-reddit as distribution of cognition is not limited to one well as rules, related sub-reddits, and related user in physical space, but many users in an outside links. This text, says En et al., illus- infinitely vast collection of virtual spaces. As trates the ways in which construction of iden- an example of this in action (as well as rhetori-

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cal reification of reddit norms), often links that easy and quick to interpret, a form of cogni- are submitted to the “wrong” sub-reddit will tive off-loading not dissimilar to a mnemonic be quickly down-voted and chastised in com- device. ment sections – a post about the New York Jets Milner uses Bahktin’s notion of “multivocal in the New England Patriots sub-reddit would and always unfinished texts overlapping” to ex- not only yield abusive comments and downvot- plain memes one could similarly use Carey’s ing, but likely a ban from the sub-reddit by the idea of ritual communication, seeing memes as administrator. Conversely, users that regularly a common media shared by a variety of com- submit to a sub-reddit and adhere to its norms munity members or perhaps a meme is an will often find a caring “community of interest,” example of Otto’s notebookâA˘ Taˇ community similar in the level of personal engagement to constructed image that represents a larger his- what Rheingold describes of the WELL. Trust- torical moment or idea (one meme Milner fo- ing communities like TwoXChromosomes, a cused on was the infamous “pepper spray cop” sub-reddit for women that “fulfills the need for that came to be a symbolic representation of a safe place (when many places on the Internet all police abuse around the Occupy Wall Street are not considered to be as welcoming to girls movement). Indeed, teasing apart these themes and women),” allow for cognitive distribution and features is difficult because they so often in the form of advice seeking/receiving that in overlap. That overlap, in this case, is crucial normal life might be impossible because of cul- Reddit’s success has hinged on a strong com- tural taboos and social stigma (Workman and munity ethos that emphasizes user-oriented Coleman 2012). At work here is one of the affor- design and self-governance, a philosophy that dances of New Media, what Julian Dibbell calls has informed much of the design and structure “psuedonymity,” by which he means a partial of the “material” artifact. This unification of shield of anonymity tempered with some sense theory and design have made reddit a breeding of identity based on a permanent screen name ground for community, and therefore a fasci- or other digital embodiment and community nating place to explore theoretical explanations membership (Dibbell 1999). of communication and distributed cognition. A final useful example of the way cognition is distributed and disseminated throughout V. Conclusion much of New Media is through the “meme.” Milner describes a meme as a “Multimodal Nothing about reddit is particularly novel. Cer- artifact remixed by countless participants, em- tain features of reddit do not even seem to be ploying popular culture for public commen- modern, much less a glimpse at the future tary,” (Milner 2013). Memes are often, though the Spartan design of the site was recently de- not necessarily, image-based, arguably a hang- scribed by a colleague of the author as “abso- over from Old Media design. What distin- lutely terrible to look at.” Despite that and guishes memes as distinctly New Media is the other issues with reddit, including spats of element of “remix” that Milner notes. The site crashes, reddit has somehow managed to affordances of the digital medium allow a achieve a level of popularity only dreamed of meme to be quickly deconstructed and re- by most social news and networking sites. Red- assembled by anyone with basic image editing dit’s success is largely built on features and skills (reddit.com/r/photoshopbattles is a sub- ideologies adopted from other sites, such as reddit dedicated to Photoshop savvy redditors sub-categorization, commenting, voting, open- “remixing” images from around the web). Al- source software, and a “public space” for com- though memes are often comical and/or banal, munity dialogue. The combination of these they can also voice strong political opinions. features allows for materially embodied rit- Moreover, the re-use of a common image and ual communication and various forms of dis- regular pop culture references make memes tributed cognition, both of which contribute to

12 gnovis Journal • Spring 2015 • Volume XVI, Issue 2 community building. about what we want communities to look like Reddit’s continued popularity will depend 50 years from now. If we continue to passively on administrators’ commitment to sustaining assume that online life is, as Rheingold says, a the affordances already offered by the site, and “life-denying simulacrum of real passion and expanding in such a way that stays true to true commitment to one another,” we are in the site’s values of self-governance and user- danger of missing the larger story. At the same oriented design. Assuming those goals are time, equally perilous would be to blindly ap- achieved, reddit may have considerable stay- plaud the internet as the great equalizer and ing power. An extended analysis of this site, site of humanity’s future without being aware possibly including ethnographic fieldwork that of those who continue to be left out (consider would inquire further into value systems of the roughly 60% of the world who does not cur- reddit and various sub-reddits, may offer some rently have internet access (6)) or the deeply insight here. Comparative work on reddit entrenched ideological histories in every line of and “traditional” social media sites like Face- program code. If we are to finally satisfy Lick- book would also be valuable, as Facebook lider’s suggestion that the online individual has increasingly become a content sharing site will lead the happier life, we must be vigilant rather than just a personal status update site. in our inquiries into what that life might look Conversely, a comprehensive analysis of Digg like. and how its embrace of traditional social media characteristics arguably led to its demise References could advise reddit or future iterations on how the site might evolve to encompass in- [1] Arthur, Brian. The Nature of Technology: creasing amounts of digital sociality. (The What It Is and How It Evolves. New York, current version of Digg has eliminated the NY: Free Press, 2009. user-submission feature almost entirely, with the vast majority of front page content be- [2] Bernstein, M., A Monroy-Hernandez, D ing posted by Digg administators). Most im- Harry, P. Andre, K. Panovich, and G. Var- portantly, future research into digital sociality gas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of must find out a means to account for “digital Anonymity and Ephemerality Online in transnationality ” there are no reddit members a Large Online Community.” Association who exist solely on reddit. Most users certainly for the Advancement of Artificial Intelli- have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and there gence, 2011. are probably a large number that regularly use other sites analyzed here like 4Chan and Digg. [3] Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Sec- Valuable cultural research could be done by ond Life: An Anthropologist Explores the tracking some of these internet vagabonds and Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton seeing how they adapt to each community and University Press, 2010. manage a variety of potentially disparate internet identities. [4] Bogers, Toine, and Rasmus Wernersen. In the meantime, it is increasingly impor- “How ‘Social’ Are Social News Sites? Ex- tant to start seeing interactions on the web ploring the Motivations for Using Red- in the terms used in this paper not as sim- dit.com.” iConference 2014 Proceedings, ply ephemeral and anonymous, nor as spaces March 1, 2014, 329—44. where culture goes to die and .gifs are valued above all, but as sites for ritual communication [5] Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. and distributed cognition. Only when we start Remediation Understanding New Media. to take sites like reddit seriously will we be 1st edition. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT able to start having meaningful conversations Press, 2000.

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[6] Bush, Vannevar. “As We May [16] Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945. New edition edition. Cambridge, Mass. A http //www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ Bradford Book, 1996. archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/. [17] Loland, Sigmund. “Justice and Game Ad- vantage in Sporting Games.” Ethical The- [7] Carey, James. “A Cultural Approach to ory and Moral Practice, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jun., Communication.” In Communications as 1999), pp. 165-183. Print. Culture Essays on Media Ad Society. New York and London Routledge, 1989. [18] Kollock, Peter, and Marc Smith. Commu- nities in Cyberspace. Routledge, 2002. [8] Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind Em- bodiment, Action, and Cognitive Exten- [19] Lagorio-Chafkin, Christine. “How sion. Oxford New York Oxford Univer- Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page sity Press, 2010 of the Internet.” Inc.com, May 2012. [9] Debray, Regis. Transmitting Culture. http //www.inc.com/magazine/201206/ Translated by Eric Rauth. New York christine-lagorio/alexis-ohanian-reddit- Columbia University Press, 2004. how-i-did-it.html.

[10] Dibbell, Julian. My Tiny Life Crime and [20] Latour, Bruno. “On Technical Mediation – Passion in a Virtual World. 1st edition. Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy.” Com- New York Holt Paperbacks, 1999. mon Knowledge 3, no. 3 (1994): 29—64.

[11] DiNucci, Darcy. “Fragmented Future.” [21] Licklider, JCR. “The Computer as a Com- Print 53, no. 4 (1999). munication Device.” Science and Technol- ogy, April 1968. [12] El Manzalawy, Mostafa. “Altruism on Reddit: A Historical Analy- [22] Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. sis.” Accessed December 10, 2014. New York and London: Bloomsbury Aca- http //www.redditaltruism.com/. demic, 2013. The Language of New Media. [13] En, Boka, Michael En, and David Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2001. . Grifﬁths. “Gay Stuff and Guy Stuff [23] Martin, Erik. “Blog.reddit — The Construction of Sexual Identities What’s New on Reddit In- in Sidebars on Reddit.” Networking dependence,” September 2011. Knowledge Journal of the MeCCSA http://www.redditblog.com/2011/09/ Postgraduate Network 6, no. 1 (August independence.html. 8, 2013). http //ojs.meccsa.org.uk/ in- dex.php/netknow/article/view/293. [24] Merritt, Emily. “An Analysis of the [14] Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Trans- Discourse of Internet Trolling: A formation of the Public Sphere An Inquiry Case Study of Reddit.com,” 2012. into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cam- https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/handle/ bridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 1991. 10166/1058.

[15] Hollan, James, Edwin Hutchins, and [25] Metz, Rachel. “Why Did Reddit David Kirsh. “Distributed Cognition To- Succeed Where Digg Failed?” MIT ward a New Foundation for Human- Technology Review, July 18, 2012. Computer Interaction Research.” ACM http://www.technologyreview.com/news/ Transactions, Computer-Human Interac- 428520/ why-did-reddit-succeed-where- tion 7, no. 2 (June 2000): 174—96. digg-failed/.

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[26] Mills, Richard. “Researching Social News the Front Page of the Internet to a Self- — Is Reddit.com a Mouthpiece for the Referential Community?” In Proceed- ‘Hive Mind’, or a Collective Intelli- ings of the Companion Publication of the gence Approach to Information Over- 23rd International Conference on World load?.” In ETHICOMP 2011 Proceedings. Wide Web Companion, 517—22. WWW Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Hallam University, Companion ‘14. Republic and Canton of 2011. http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/61646/. Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Commit- [27] Milner, Ryan M. “Pop Polyvocality: Inter- tee, 2014. doi:10.1145/2567948.2576943. net Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” Interna- [34] Slattery, Brennon. “Has Digg Dug Its tional Journal of Communication 7, no. 0 Own Grave?” PCWorld, August 31, 2010. (October 30, 2013): 34. http://www.pcworld.com/article/204571/ Has—Digg—Dug—its—Grave.html. [28] Nardi, Bonnie. My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of [35] Steve. “Blog.reddit — What’s New on Red- World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: University dit: Reddit Goes Open Source,” June 2008. of Michigan Press, 2010. http://www.redditblog.com/2008/06/ reddit-goes-open-source.html. [29] Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, [36] Stryker, Cole. “4channers Hunt Down Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Detroit Couple Taunting Dying Girl Heart of a Community. 3rd edition. New While Reddit Donates to the Victim’s York: Berkeley, Calif.: Marlowe Company, Family.” Urlesque, October 8, 2010. 1999. http://www.urlesque.com/2010/10/08/ 4chan-hunts-down-detroit-couple- [30] Porter, David, ed. Internet Culture. New taunting-dying-girl/. York: Routledge, 1997. [37] Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cy- [31] Potts, Liza, and Angela Harrison. “Inter- berculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole faces As Rhetorical Constructions: Reddit Earth Network, and the Rise of Digi- and 4Chan During the Boston Marathon tal Utopianism. Chicago: University Of Bombings.” In Proceedings of the 31st Chicago Press, 2008. ACM International Conference on De- sign of Communication, 143—50. SIG- [38] Wardrip—Fruin, Noah, and Nick Mont- DOC ’13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013. fort, eds. The New Media Reader. Cam- doi:10.1145/2507065.2507079. bridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2003.

[32] Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Com- [39] Workman, Hallie, and Catherine A. Cole- munity: Homesteading on the Electronic man. “‘The Front Page of the Internet’: Frontier. MIT Press, 1993. Safe Spaces and Hyperpersonal Commu- nication among Females in an Online [33] Singer, Philipp, Fabian Flock, Clemens Community.” Southwestern Mass Com- Meinhart, Elias Zeitfogel, and Markus munication Journal 27, no. 3 (September Strohmaier. “Evolution of Reddit: From 2012): 1—21.