Why? Simply put, Ekdale, associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and researcher affiliate in the Center for Social Science Innovation (CSSI) wants to understand how the algorithm lurking underneath can quietly – but impactfully – shape our worldviews and beliefs.

When Ekdale entered college, this goal was certainly not on his radar. It was right before the heyday of the Internet and years before the addicting nature of social media.

Growing up partly in Dubuque, Iowa, Ekdale decided to study communications and computer science as an undergraduate at Augustana in the Quad Cities.

He picked communications because he enjoyed working as a yearbook editor at his high school. One summer, he even attended an Iowa Summer Journalism Workshop to learn how to improve his editing chops.

Computer science came about because a friend encouraged him to take some courses on the topic, causing Ekdale to realize he had a natural aptitude and enjoyment of the field.

After graduating, Ekdale worked in IT during the day, and produced films at night and on the weekend.

“I think what I learned from that experience is I wanted to flip that arrangement. I was working a job so that I could do my passion, outside of work, and I wanted to change that,” Ekdale reflects.

“I wanted to go study the thing I was passionate about so I could make that my work.”

Africa’s storytelling and the global audience

So, Ekdale returned to school, pursuing a master’s in video production from Northern Illinois University. While there, a family friend invited him on a medical service trip to Malawi, which he chronicled in the documentary “10 Days in Malawi” as a requirement for his graduate program.

When he returned to the United States, he took a class on international media and realized the ignorance he had when producing the documentary.

“Basically, the story I told was about a bunch of rich, white Americans who go into an African country and provide medical care. What would have been an entirely different story would be to work with Malawians to understand what are the issues that are important to them and what they would want the rest of the world to know about their lives,” Ekdale explains.

The experience made him think more deeply about media production within Africa. Ekdale wondered what their media looked like, what stories they were telling, and who was telling them.

So, he decided to focus his PhD on exactly that – global digital cultures – at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

During the program, Ekdale met his wife Melissa Tully, professor at the University of Iowa and director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Since then, they have collaborated professionally, while also diverging in their own interests.

“The other day I was looking for a paper on Google Scholar about a particular topic and the second paper was one my wife had written. I thought what an interesting phenomenon that I am trying to learn about something, and the foremost scholar shares a home and life with me. That’s certainly unique,” Ekdale shares.

Ekdale’s own research interests center around media production in Kenya and how those media industries have an impact on the global scale.

For example, a recent study by Ekdale investigated how drivers for Uber – one form of a media industry – in Kenya resisted the company’s methods to limit their opportunities on the app. Ekdale found that drivers extended rides, added customers outside of the app, and went on strike to thwart the app’s control.

Ekdale also looked at how Uber-driving in Kenya, a job seen as part of the informal “gig economy,” could provide reassurance to the West’s concerns the gig economy is potentially unstable and unreliable.

“A lot of the concerns we saw about gig and digital work were actually the norm in places like Kenya. So, I wanted to understand what Kenya can teach the rest of the world about adapting to these changes and what that work looks like,” Ekdale explains.

To answer these questions, Ekdale conducted fieldwork in Kenya, taking Uber rides himself and having unstructured conversations with the drivers.

“I like talking to people. I like understanding why people do what they do, what makes them tick,” Ekdale professes about his motivations for doing fieldwork.

Peeling back the surface of social media

Ekdale’s work in Kenya was suddenly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For Ekdale, who thought his research in global digital cultures was going to be his bread and butter, the pandemic threw a wrench in his plans and spirit.

Returning to the United States, Ekdale had conversations with his colleagues – specifically his Center for Publics, Platforms, and Personalization (CP3) colleagues – that grounded him during the time.

CP3 started as a scientific journal reading group in 2015, bringing together faculty from different departments.

The group began to formalize into a research-producing entity when Kris Ackerson, grant development manager at CSSI, helped the group secure two grants to study how personalization algorithms work and their impact on society.

“One of the challenges of the digitalized age is that algorithmic processes are hidden from users. We don’t know the broader social implications of that,” Ekdale, the director of CP3, asserts.

One goal of CP3 is to understand how people can be radicalized on social media via personalized algorithms.

To do so, CP3 administered a survey that measured people’s social media use and their views on political issues. A year later, participants completed the same survey and those who demonstrated the greatest shift towards political radicalization were later interviewed. Lisa Halm-Werner, project specialist at CSSI, helped train undergraduates to conduct the interviews.

A second CP3 project is looking at how social media users can be susceptible to foreign influence campaigns, which is the dissemination of deliberate propaganda from foreign countries, such as China and Russia. When individuals are susceptible and engage with these posts through likes, reposts, and comments, the disinformation can rapidly spread across social media.

For the project, Ekdale is, once more, using CSSI to help conduct focus groups to understand how people engage with social media. They are also doing an experiment to see what form of an engagement – a like, repost, or comment – has the most impact on circulating the post.

“Then we’re going to use the experiment’s results to map the vulnerabilities to foreign influence campaigns and come up with potential strategies to reduce the spread of these campaigns,” Ekdale speaks of the project’s broader importance.

The entwinement of culture and media

A final thread of Ekdale’s research explores global knowledge production. Ekdale points out that a large amount of research is produced primarily from researchers in the United States and Europe.

“This matters because we are trying to recognize that what we know is biased in various ways towards the Global North. What can we do to try to challenge that and change that for the better?” Ekdale asks.

Ekdale wants to bring other cultural voices to the forefront, an ambition that echoes his commitment to cultural sensitivity – especially in relation to media production.

“Media and culture are entwined with each other,” Ekdale asserts.

“The way we experience the world is through media. We need to understand how media impacts our view of the world.”