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 im- portant 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 cu- ration 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 red- dit, historically or currently. However, in com- bination with a fuller realization of the poten- tial affordances of the web medium and shared cultural values of users and site managers, red- dit offers an insightful view into modern digi- tal 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 2 gnovis Journal • Spring 2015 • Volume XVI, Issue 2 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.