Get To Know 23-24 BKC Fellow: Rebekah Larsen
Rebekah Larsen is a 2023-2024 Berkman Klein Center Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights. This past year, she was also a lecturer and postdoctoral associate for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies department.
I saw that you’re working on a mapping project of the media space around Utah: you mentioned rural, religion, and radio. How do you feel your experiences all come together to inform your research? What's your process when you're trying to figure out what questions to ask, and how do your past experiences factor into that?
That's a really good question. There are a lot of different ways to answer that: I’ll take it first from the sociology side and the academic side. In 2016, I was beginning my Ph.D. and as you know, there was lots of socio-political upheaval at that time. It took many social scientists and other people in liberal spaces by surprise. That triggered a lot of discussion: what were we doing wrong? How did we not see this coming? How can we be better in terms of our research and how it can help the public? And I saw a lot of the discussion devolve into, “Oh, rural America is just uneducated.” That's a pretty common narrative when it comes to explaining voting patterns and polarization in the country, even now. As someone who grew up in one of those spaces (rural Utah), I know that the story is a lot more complicated than that. And when we pigeonhole wide swaths of people with those sorts of descriptions, that is an act of polarization.
For me, one of the reasons that I, at least for this time at Harvard, am looking at talk radio and religion, was because I have lived experience around that. This gives me access to those places—I can talk the talk, I know the background (at least of the place where I grew up), and I’ve been able to actually speak with people. I think given the era of polarization we're in, many people would be quite hesitant to talk to a researcher that's parachuting in.
Then relatedly, the mapping. At least in media studies, there's been a lot of focus on the digital, which is great! I also do that. I am very much someone who's thinking about what digital technologies are doing in terms of society (since I'm a sociologist), in terms of inequalities, how different tech impacts different people, who gets a say in what's built and how, etc. But I’ve also realized—and I think there's now a broader recognition of this—that research doesn’t take into account a lot of still-very-relevant media that aren’t necessarily digital, like radio. Talk radio, in particular, is a good case study because it's so powerful in the US; radio is one of the most trusted mediums, according to research. It's a very intimate media, and surprisingly still has a very big reach: according to Pew Center studies, the majority of Americans hear some radio every week. But it's also really hard to study. That's one of the reasons there’s so much of the digital, like the Twitter API (or at least, what it used to be). That was all you would see when you went to academic conferences and read publications. I'm generalizing a bit, but there's just been a lot of focus on the digital because it's easier to collect the data.
But it doesn't always give us insight into some spaces where we need more insight. Radio is tricky for that. There's no easy way to collect data from local radio broadcasts. It's very circumscribed by geography. So the research that I'm going to be doing at Berkman is in that intersection of rural, radio, and religion. I focused on radio, mostly, but there are other reasons why those three intersect. I think it's also understood that they’re very important. There's a lot of political talk going on there, particularly conservative, and often, there is a lot of misinformation that we miss on these types of media, particularly talk radio, because it's hard to study. That's one reason why I've started by talking to the people who are producing talk radio, or who own the talk radio station. I'm trying to get a sense of their practices, their connections, and what they're putting out there. I've also been trying to drive through the state and collect broadcasts just on my computer and my radio. Like I carry radios. That's the level we're at in terms of tech, unfortunately.
Since you're currently teaching a class at MIT, how does being both a teacher and a researcher intersect for you? How does each role influence the other?
I was lucky enough to teach Intro to Media Studies, the gateway course at MIT for the Comparative Media Studies department. What's great about it is that they allow each person who's teaching it to tailor the syllabus based on their interests and background. You still have to hit all the main notes, but I was able to tailor it to things that I wanted to know more about, as well as things I thought my students would be excited about. So at the beginning of the semester, I told them, “Okay, send me whatever media you're interested in—form, show, music, whatever—and we'll see how we can work it into the syllabus.” That also allowed me to update my own media diet, gently.
I talked earlier about how we need to keep looking at radio broadcasts, but media really is changing. It's so huge, and there really are a lot of changes going on. For me, personally, it was really nice for my research to hear more about things like the BeReal app. My students were all [mimics BeReal selfie]. They also got me on TikTok. And teaching like that actually helps me in terms of being up-to-date with more media. That’s in addition to me being able to assign things that I want them to learn. People say it and it's true: the best way to learn something is to teach it. And I do miss my students! It was really nice getting to know them, and a lot of the things we talked about in class were also around identity, power, gender, and race in media representation. Being able to have conversations in our somewhat-diverse classroom about people's experiences at MIT was really cool.
Today’s media landscape is intense. Twitter is dying by the millions. There’s Threads and BlueSky, political turmoil and war, ever-evolving generative AI, and constant waves of movement in every direction. How do you keep up with all of it and factor it into your work?
I mean, you have to put the work in to get a sense of what's happening almost day-to-day. But I also think for a lot of researchers, there's this sense of “technological exceptionalism” with which you start to see these things being framed—the mindset that there's always going to be something new. There's always going to be this narrative that “everything is different now.” That “now, everything has changed.”
But if you study media history, you'll see that a lot of these phenomena are just pattern-like reactions to certain media or certain content. And you can say, “Actually, something similar to this happened years ago with this. We can see techno panics and moral panics about this sort of thing: we've seen it rear its head over the last several decades.” I think having that framing makes it a little less overwhelming, this feeling that everything is now different or “exceptionally” different. For example, there's a long-standing preoccupation with how youth interact with the media. Moral panics over that are exceptionalist and very “this is the beginning of the end,” all the time. You’re right: a lot of things are changing, but it's good to keep in mind that it's not a mystery, though maybe it isn't entirely cyclical either.
Interviewer
Liya Jin is an experimental designer, researcher, artist, and technologist striving to create more equitable opportunity ecosystems. During the summer of 2023, she interned with the Berkman Klein Center’s metaLAB team.