Kim Kardashian West On Oversharing, Adopting New Platforms, And BlackBerry

Kim Kardashian West

If you told a random member of the tech media a year ago that one of the biggest names interviewed by Kara Swisher at her own conference in 2014 would be Kim Kardashian West, you’d probably receive a dumb look and a quick dismissal. Yet that’s exactly what happened at today’s Code/Mobile conference, where the reality TV and social media star reflected on the growing role  of mobile tech in celebrity life.

Swisher began her interview by asking why people don’t seem to take Kardashian West seriously despite the fact that she’s managed to turn a reality TV show and millions of followers on Instagram and Twitter into an influential brand and millions of dollars in app revenue from her eponymous game. Kardashian West noted that social media is just one of the jobs that make up her busy work days, which also include raising her daughter and filming her show (five months out of the year), though it is perhaps the most public aspect of her life, so people tend to focus on it despite not seeming like work.

While she spends a lot of time handling her social feeds, Kardashian West says that she puts boundaries on herself and her mobile usage. “I took a while to share things with my daughter, and still don’t share everything they do on a daily basis,” she said, and also pointed out that she’s “protective” about oversharing about her relationship, saying that in the past she’s perhaps crossed that line. When it comes to post frequency, Kardashian West said she tries to avoid spamming her followers by limiting her posts to 3 images per setting or event.

In terms of actual mobile apps and how she uses them, Kardashian West focuses on the networks where she’s built her biggest audiences, but she does experiment with new ones now and then (and has been for some time — she mentioned that she started building online identities with Friendster and MySpace). For instance, she says she likes Snapchat and that her sisters are regular users, though she doesn’t use it because “honestly, I don’t have the time.”

When Swisher touched upon which platforms Kardashian West spends her time on, she professed her undying love for the declining BlackBerry: “People are horrified that I use a BlackBerry, but I’ll never get rid of it — if you have to handle an email and you have to type fast, I need that board.” To the chagrin of the BlackBerry PR team thinking they finally had some good news, she also said that she uses an iPhone for all of her photos and social media. As with Snapchat, she doesn’t use an Android device because one more device would be too much, though she tried to avoid offending any power users in the audience by stating that those with more than two phones must be doing real work.