Politicum
The democratically sustainable
news aggregator
Designed for:
FH Potsdam
Supervised by:
Prof. Reto Wettach
Prof. Dr. Frank Heidmann
Year of origin:
2017
Output Situation
Since its commercialization at the beginning of the 1990s, the Internet has been celebrated as the democratic medium that should give people free access to all information and at the same time provide them with a platform for disseminating their own content and opinions. It quickly became clear, however, that the information surplus that had arisen could only be managed if the available mass of information was pre-sorted and pre-filtered using algorithms. Since around 2009, these algorithms have been improved to include personal user information in the formulas in order to adapt search results even better to the needs of the individual user. On the one hand, there is the ideal of the democratic medium, while on the other the new intermediaries are clearly pursuing financial interests. For the better, the personalization of a site, the more clicks and (advertising) revenues will be generated. The authors of the algorithms now have so much different data about their users at their disposal that filtering has a strong segregating effect.
As a result, in many places we observe deeply divided societies in which those who shout loudest can influence public opinion the most. Most recently, the British vote on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in June and the US presidential election in November 2016 sparked a new debate about the increasing personalization and its influence on political opinion-forming. It was observed that the automated (and at the same time hidden) categorization of subjects and the corresponding filtering of information had different effects on the various actors in the democratic process. Above all, however, the political discourse is endangered by the artificially restricted access of a user to information outside his own sphere of interest and opinion.
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.
Eli Pariser
Concept
For this reason, it was my concern to create a prototype for a discourse-promoting news aggregator based on the analysis of the topic as well as the problems and needs of different actors in the context of political information services. Especially with emotionally charged topics it is therefore important to see all opinion camps represented equally. To be able to compare and contrast them means for the user to get to know the arguments (and not arguments) of both sides and on this basis to be able to form his own opinion without feeling isolated.
Process
After having dealt with the underlying sociological phenomena (e.g. information overflow, attention crash, disintermediation, filter bubbles, echo chambers, public opinion formation, silence spirals) and current media research, I formulated my goals for a contemporary, ethical intermediation service in one sentence based on my findings:
The economic mediation of valuable and value-free political information to promote discourse among as broad a group of people as possible.
Goals
It contains the following five goals, which I concentrated on in week-long Google Design Sprints and created and tested a constantly growing high-fidelity prototype. However, this process was somewhat more chaotic, as the individual subject areas could not always be so clearly distinguished from each other. The findings from one sprint could sometimes be better applied to another.
Broad Target Group
For which device should I design in order to address as wide a target group as possible? Which target group is interesting for this project and for what reason? Which sources and which information should I consider in order to address as many users as possible? In which formats should the information be available? How to deal with the staggering of categories/dossiers, topics and articles?
Economic Efficiency
News aggregation offers an added value for people who are willing to spend money. What are possible sources of income for service? What incentives could a paid service offer? How do you get users to switch to a subscription model? How much would users be willing to spend? How does the registration and login process work?
(Educational) Value
Sensitive message aggregation and curated aggregation promotes serendipity. How should an article be structured for the respective carrier medium? How long and detailed may it be? How can articles be put together in a meaningful way other than in classical areas of responsibility? How broad should the topics be? Which topics promote sales?
Freedom of Values and
Promotion of Discourse
Opposing and comparative reporting creates intersubjective freedom of value and promotes tolerance and rational discourse. How can constructive discourse be established? How can one prevent defeatist reactions of defiance on the part of the user who feels marginalized (“the press of lies”)? What tools does a discourse within the application need?
Mediation as filtering
Manipulable filtering is unusable in everyday news consumption. According to which criteria are topics and articles selected? How broad should the spectrum of opinions taken into consideration be? How to deal with fake news? Where does it make sense to enable the user to manually filter? When does it become too complex?
Design
Theme Carousel
Topics are offered by Politicum in a full-screen horizontal carousel. If the user is connected to the Internet via WLAN, a soundless video is played over the entire surface instead of the static background image. The info overlay shows the title of the current article, its source and publication time next to the topic. At the bottom of the overlay is metadata showing how long the article is (measured in reading time) and the frequency with which previous readers rated the article as “important” (green exclamation mark) or “questionable” (red question mark).
Menu
In the menu the user can manage his account, which he needs to be able to write comments, or register directly with Politicum Premium, the paid subscription version of the service. The user also has the possibility to set the source comparison, the regional news, the video quality, and the notifications. In addition, you can find information on the imprint and data protection here at any time.
InteraCtionS
Swiping to the left takes the user to the next topic and wiping to the right takes the user to the previous one. The dots at the top indicate the pagination and provide information on how many topics are currently covered in the respective collection. If the user swipes beyond the first or last topic of a collection, he automatically ends up in the previous or next collection. The arrow at the bottom of the screen indicates to the user that the article can be brought into the viewport by swipe up or tap in this region. If there is a tap above this area, the navigation bar will show or hide in its right corner, by tapping on the hamburger icon, the menu can be opened.
Collections
When dealing with the categorization of news content, I noticed two things in particular in the classic news houses. First of all, the positive aspect: in the case of the online news offerings of the Sueddeutsche and the New York Times, at the beginning of almost every text, the context of the article content is presented briefly and objectively in key points. This helps tremendously to quickly find one’s way into a topic and at the same time offers the opportunity to dive deeper into the context by linking to the corresponding articles. This principle is also taken up in Politicum. However, I have kept this block “Context and Backgrounds” somewhat more detailed and, in order not to disturb the reading flow, have placed it at the end of the article. The negative aspect was the way in which the news media sorted their articles into the classic sections. Of course, this has its reasons, but such rigid structures are not conducive to serendipity. So, inspired by services like Spotify and Netflix, I decided to organize the themes into much softer categories, which I call collections, as described above. Each collection consists of a curated merry-go-round of themes that have certain things in common, but don’t necessarily have to refer to the department. To change the category, the user simply has to tap on the dropdown in the navigation bar.
Articles
Politicum follows the following principles: All points of view on a topic are treated absolutely equally. This means that, first of all, quantitative equivalence is required. Each point of view on a topic must be represented exactly once. The articles that Politicum juxtaposes are chosen by editors with the aim of finding the strongest article of the respective point of view. The articles should have approximately the same length. When comparing articles on the same topic, their order is generated randomly. The evaluation of the articles happens only by the users. They can mark the whole article, as well as individual text passages as “important” or as “questionable”. Both ways of marking influence the counter in the info overlay in the theme carousel.
Markers on the text
In order to comment on individual text passages with yes or no comments, the user can mark the corresponding passage in the text and select one of the two options in the popover. This text passage is then removed from the article and transferred to a chat window as a quotation. The user can leave his comment here or cancel the process again. Annotated passages in the text are marked by a correspondingly coloured bar on the right edge of the text. Tap on such a bar to open the chat window. All comments, however, are also summarized below the article text in the comment area.
Filtering
By adding two tabs to the navigation bar for the “Controversies” collection, which allow the user to switch back and forth between two different sources on the same topic, he can compare them as described in Chapter 4.4. By default, the two sources are set automatically – individually for each topic. The Politicum editorial staff selects them in advance for the respective topic according to where the most interesting differences in reporting occur. However, the sources can also be exchanged manually by the user in the menu section “Source comparison”. To do this, the user must first activate the checkbox “Manual source filters” and can then change both sources individually in the context menu. If he chooses a source that is not available for the respective article, the tabs jump back to the fallback solution of the automatic source selection with a hint. Another special case is the regional news. Here the user can manually define a city or a postal code as well as a radius in the menu, if he has switched off the automatic location determination, whereupon the regional news is called according to these settings.