Ruby Thelot on Internet Culture, AI, and the Future of Taste

**Ruby Thelot** (0:00)
Americans don't like AI. AI is a very broad term. They all use chat. And I love it. I love chat. But they don't like AI. It's the boogeyman of like, I'm going to lose my job.
But when I talk to mothers in Brian Techs, it's like, oh yeah, I had a leak in my faucet, whatever. I took a photo, and in about an hour or two, I was able to fix that thing. I love that.
There's a bit of a language issue here around what does this technology do for me versus what is the negative impact that's coming in a somewhat near potential future.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
Today's episode comes from our list of Recommended Listening, where we feature standout conversations from people across our broader network. This one stuck with us for its thoughtful perspective on AI, internet culture, and the ways technology is quietly reshaping how we communicate and relate to one another.
MTS hosts Sophia Dew and Sophia Puccini are joined by designer, cyberethnographer, and NYU professor Ruby J. Thelot to discuss digital communities, online identity, taste, and what it means to live alongside rapidly evolving technology.

**Sophia Dew** (1:11)
Today, I'm joined by my co-host Sophia as well as Ruby Justice Thelot, who is a designer, artist, cyberethnographer, and professor at the Integrated Design and Media at NYU. So, he's written about everything from internet folklore to digital memory to AI companions, creativity in the future of culture. And I think he has one of the most interesting perspectives on what it really means to live alongside this technology. So, Ruby, I am so excited to have you on today.

**Sofia Puccini** (1:41)
The question on everyone's mind, what is a cyberethnographer? And also, how has the field evolved through the years?

**Ruby Thelot** (1:46)
So, a cyberethnographer is someone who studies groups of people online and how they behave and what they do. So, my research ranges from studying furries, all the way to now studying how people are using Instagram.
I had a recent piece for Protein where I asked people what they understood, what an Instagram story like meant to them. And so, around 500 people, 20 sort of closer interviews to build a lexicon, a glossary of what does this digital interaction mean to people? Is it content appreciation? Is it romantic affiliation? Or is it just, you know, friendship continuation, which are the three sort of, the three partite meaning structure that I built for Instagram story likes.
With the Mozilla Foundation recently, I did research on close friends. Okay, so we have this new thing now called close friends on Instagram. If you're in my close friends, are we acquaintances? Are we like families? And how do we choose who gets to be in these different sort of digital spaces? These are novel behaviors that did not exist two years or three years ago, and we need to build understanding and language around them. And that's a big part of my research.

**Sophia Dew** (2:56)
What's interesting here is that cyberethanography is not something that's necessarily new. This is not a new field. However, my hunch is that this field has probably been changing a lot in the last few years or at least in the past decade with just the progress of technology and the introduction of new types of social media, new types of online behaviors. Even just Gen Alpha, just a generation underneath, has a whole different interaction with their technology than we do as Gen Z or than millennials above us. And so I'm curious to get your perspective on how this whole space has changed.

**Ruby Thelot** (3:29)
I mean, there's the goats like Dana Boyd. I mean, she's a big inspiration for my own research.
A big part of me trying to understand what close friends meant was looking at her research on MySpace Top 8 when she was at Microsoft for a long time, not just at Cornell as a professor, and she was leading a team at Microsoft Research. And so people have been doing these things for a long time. But of course, the cycles are accelerating.

**Sofia Puccini** (3:54)
Yeah.

**Ruby Thelot** (3:54)
And the features are getting shipped faster and faster. And we have these changes in, you know, I like to say that every novel technology leads to changes in being, communicating, and belief.
And the faster these things happen, the less time we have as researchers or academics to do the research and do the interviews. But I think it still needs to be done, because millions, if not billions of people are using these tools and these features.

**Sofia Puccini** (4:21)
Yeah, yeah, totally. So one of my questions was, like, basically, how long does it take to identify a new social phenomena online? And then how many of them are actually perceptible versus imperceptible? Because I think, for example, like, a lot of teachers, if they have young kids and they're teaching like Gen Alpha, they will, like, be very confused for a long time about, like, what is this new 6.7 thing?