For this weekend’s assignment, our focus was to “rewire” by changing our channels of media reception. Since I get most of my news channels and information from Instagram, I decide to erase the app from my phone and migrate to Reddit for a few days.
As “the front page of the internet”, I expected to obtain new perspectives, different sources of media, and forms of discussion different to the ones on Instagram that could shed some light on previous biases. Therefore, I took one of the suggested usernames, Professional_Cherry, and started my voyage through Reddit.
After reading the description about serendipity on “Digital Cosmopolitans” by Ethan Zuckerman, I felt like I had hit the jackpot with the activity. Zuckerman mentions that in order to achieve serendipity “we need to stumble on unexpected influences to make novel connections. This means granting some of our attention to curators – human and mechanical – who can introduce us to unexpected influences”. On Instagram, I tend to follow certified newspapers, fortune 500 companies, consulting firms, etc. – so the curation is very specific with a clear agenda for each of these institutions. News are portrayed in a specific journalistic format, announcements are made in official statements. This forum does not facilitate second perspectives – in the way that it is the companies that post about their news, and not people posting about the news that this company publishes. In addition to that, the medium itself is not designed for discussion, but the interaction modes are inclined towards “tagging”, where these tags normally stay within a first-network interaction of your friends and family – therefore there is mainly one way of receiving their message.
In contrast, Reddit’s model allows for posts to shared from a second perspective, where it is the average user that can get the equivalent attention as the Instagram verified user. Therefore, the curator changes – along with the purpose of the post and the agenda behind it. What is also a main differentiator with the Reddit postings is that it’s main purpose is to spark discussion, whether it’s on a news posting, a question, a recommendation, etc. This allows to build upon the second perspective, and that is where the new insights can come in. Posts are not only made as captions, but in the forms of interactive discussion that can have essay style lengths.
In terms of discovering new content by avoiding biases, I believe Reddit is able to promote this in a particular way. There are subreddits such as r/worldnews (19.9 m subscribers) whose focus is on global news that EXCLUDES US-internal news. There is another subreddit called r/UpliftingNews (13.7 m) that only focuses on providing positive headlines. The top subreddit has 21.3 m subscribers, this places these two subreddits at the top of exposure within the subreddit rank, where they make the top 50 most popular threads. Going back to what Zuckerman said about media biases in chapter 3, where the only news that would be published for Nigeria would be in negative contexts regardless of all the positive potential headlines, Reddit allows for this type of subjective filtering to be left out. However, one may only receive these subreddit postings if they choose to subscribe to it, which is a personal filtering that would not lead to serendipity. But, Reddit poses another platform that can go beyond this – the front end. When one goes to the popular posts, one can see the most upvoted content of any subreddit, leading you to change your filter based on what the Reddit world is currently looking at.
And who makes up this Reddit world? Reddit has a total of 250 million users, 56% are American, and the second largest population is in the UK with 7.3%. Here we can see that the US does make up a majority, which does show signs that the content is curated by a specific demographic. However, it is rescuable to see that the other 44% is broken down into more diverse range, which is indicated by 49% difference between the first and the second top Reddit populations.
As you can see, this exercise has allowed me not only to dive into this Reddit world in order to Rewire, but the platform itself sparked a lot of interest in me and therefore I started looking up more into what makes up Reddit. I’m pretty sure I am still not aware of how everything works, since it seems to have a lot of layers, but up til now, I’ve been able to obtain new content. For example this morning, someone posted in r/news about how a US teacher in Mexico was killed by a cartel – and all the comments in the subreddits talk about how the cartel has acted within their scenario. Of course, not all of these stories make it to the news, and I would even say this one did make it because it was a teacher from the US. News like this would not be relevant without this figure since, and publishing regardless would be too repetitive! If it were to be reported without the US component, headlines like this would appear every other day at NBC people would first of all not care since it doesn’t directly prevail them, and even if they did it would eventually be desensitized due to its frequency. However, in Reddit discussions, one is able to see the power of the cartels more in detail. I can take it as alternative news, as it is not hard to believe. And just like this, I am exposed to new corners of the world.
Orignal Post in r/news 
Overall, this has been a positive experience for me. After this, I’m definitely going to continue using reddit, and might perhaps even post content of my own!