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We’re living in a world of media abundance. Every day, we are exposed to huge amounts of information, of which we consume a considerable amount without even noticing its quality and variety. Through these information, we get to understand ongoing social agenda, form our own opinion, and take positions. While meeting different opinions, we exchange ideas to gain knowledge, but in other occasions, we encounter conflicts.
Such conflicts happened between family members, friends, different generations, or different social groups. That could be minor and dissolved gradually, or turn into gaps and barriers between people, and even end up ripping the society apart. How many of the conflicts actually result from information asymmetry or ones' own closed-mindedness? How do we avoid the conflicts and enhance the healthy and constructive dialogues?
INFORMATION ASYMMETRY
At the beginning, I focused on how and why information asymmetry occurs. Through in-depth interview, I understood how people form and reform opinions, and what the role of media in the process is. The key findings includes: A. People acquire information through both ‘passive’ and ‘active’ consumption. B. Throughout the entire process, one can tackle with the asymmetry issue from five aspects: 1. More balanced stories by mainstream media. 2. Audience co-curated information content. 3. Integrated information from different source. 4. Personal awareness of different point-of-views. 5. Better opinion exchange and discussion mechanism.
POSITIONAL CONFLICTS
While thinking back of the origin motivation, the value of solving media asymmetry is in fact to reduce the conflict. Therefore I tried to study how and why people are having conflicts when holding different opinions. Turns out that the 'closed-mindedness' is the key, and both active and passive information consumption can lead to a closed-mindedness.
Passive consumption such as reading facebook feeds may lead to 'filter bubble'- a phenomenon result from media filters out what they don’t want people to see; while active consumption such as browsing web pages may also lead to one’s own 'self-reinforcing feedback loop'- people tend to read opinions aligned with their owns and thus feel their opinions were strengthened.
Thus, one key to reduce the conflict is to avoid people unconsciously consuming unbalanced information and remain the open-mindedness. And make oneself be aware of his/her own information balance.
ROLY-POVY
Roly-POVY aims to help people understand ongoing social agendas in a more balanced way. It consists of a physical reminder and a crowd-tagging system. By revealing the underlying position of every piece of information that people are acquiring, it helps people be aware of overdosing on one-sided opinions and informs them such information imbalance.
The crowd-tagging system is an online platform which allows people to tag the underlying position of a piece of information he or she finds on websites, TV programs, radios or other trackable sources. Everyone can add a tag that he/she thinks is indicating the position of the information, and the information will be labelled as the position most people has tagged. In this way, a lot of information related to the same agenda can be sorted into different positions, and while browsing, watching, or listening to this information, the audience will be notified of the corresponding position.
The egg-shaped physical reminder works like an action roly-poly with multiple layers light from inside. While the user is consuming an item of tagged information, it flashes a certain color which indicates the position. Over time, if the user’s consumption is diverse enough, Roly-POVY stands upright and displays multiple colors showing that the user has been browsing information representing various points-of-view. Otherwise, the user will get a tilted and homogeneously colored Roly-POVY, which indicates that the user’s consumption was unbalanced, and he/she needs to adjust the habits of acquiring information in order to avoid a biased mind.
Roly-POVY makes information consumption a tangible, shareable, and playful experience. It motivates people to become more conscious about their information digestion habits, to avoid possible bias, to think independently and to retain open minds. When people are well-informed, members of our society will pay more respect to each other, be open-minded, and care more deeply on the path for peace.
DECONSTRUCTION
BRAINSTORMING
IDEATION
PROTOTYPING
ITERATION
USER TESTING
