Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants

Annika Richterich (Siegen)

“Karma, precious Karma”. Reddit and the Gamification of Social Media

‘Gamification’ ‒ a term coined by Nick Pelling in 2002 ‒ has become a ubiquitous, though somehow transparent layer of social media. The concept describes the transfer of typical gaming elements such as achievement badges, progress bars or virtual money into other contexts. In contrast to games, social media usually do not offer objective procedures in order to gain achievements and rewards of participation. Instead, users have to acquaint themselves with content logics, audience preferences and communication habits of the respective social media. In order to achieve and maximize feedback, they adjust their social media participation to an assumed audience. This strategy can be observed among users of the social news aggregator Reddit and currently polarizes the overall user group. To give an example, users provide narrative teasers of possible stories they would tell, if only other users would give them upvotes and refrain from downvoting the contribution. The effort of participation is only made under the condition of a quantifiable reward. Such attention-oriented user strategies have been described as ‘karmawhoring’ by Redditors. This development is particularly remarkable since Reddit claims to represent a rather altruistic user ideology which is semantically emphasized by labeling users’ points as “Karma”. One reason for internal critique of Reddit’s ‘econometrization’ is that it merely results in multiplying content at the expense of its uniqueness and quality. This paper sets out to analyze ‘karmawhoring’ strategies, their general consequences as well as specific counter-reactions and resistance to this ‘infiltration’ of intrinsically motivated participation and interaction.

Annika Richterich has recently completed her Ph.D. in Media Studies at University of Siegen, Germany. She has studied Media Culture and Economics in Siegen, and Sociology at the University of Auckland. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Graduate School “Locating Media” (University of Siegen). Her research interests include issues in net-cultures and net-politics, social news media as well as media usage for political communication and within protest movements.

richterich@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de

Recent Publications

2013a: Geomediale Fiktionen. Zur Remediation von Landkarten in digitaler Literatur, Bielefeld: transcript (forthcoming).

2013b: “Laboratorien des Protests” (with Pablo Abend), in: Navigationen 12/2, Raphaela Knipp, Johannes Paßmann, and Nadine Taha (ed.), Vom Feld zum Labor und zurück (in preparation).

2011: “Cartographies of Digital Fiction: Amateurs Mapping a New Literary Realism,” in: The Cartographic Journal 48/4, Special Issue: Cartographies of Fictional Worlds, 237−249.