Can we do more than just consume news and information? Can we learn to synthesize it?
We have a problem in our shining new information age. There is too much out there, being generated every day, for a member of the general public to synthesize.
We don’t know how to do anything else now except consume.
If we are constantly consuming, is there room in our lives to synthesize what we just learned from news media and reflect on that learning? Can this be habitual, as natural as reading an article?
It can be hard to do this because there is no space in our information context to think and reflect. Due to the nature of media and stigmatization of commenting due to harassment, discourse suffers. Thus the only way to synthesize is in person with a peer.
A young person who has grown up understanding the context of the internet and the way discourse is susceptible to breakdown is even less likely to participate in any kind of discourse. On top of that, a young person in college or freshly graduated, who has just started to prop up their independent life is worrying about other things, and only really consuming information.
They don’t have time to consider myriad of issues every day that affect them now, or might affect them in the future; nor do they even know the scope of what will affect their life.
Here is where media companies such as Vox come in. They have a goal to create relatable content that helps educate and inform their reader base. To be sure their content is exemplary but does it elicit strong critical reflection of Vox’s own content by their readers?
No, it only tells them the facts.
This is where I have intervened.
My name is Adam Lukasik, I am a student at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and I have been working to create a digital space that gives a reader an opportunity to reflect on the information they consume on the day to day.
My goal was to give someone an opportunity to reflect emotionally and then intellectually to a piece of information or an issue.
I felt the best place to start was an intervention into Vox’s mobile reader.
The main concept is that once a reader finishes an article or a section of an article, they are asked for an emotional response to the article. This emotional response is meant to serve two purposes. Firstly it is built to get the reader to invest in an opinion and not just passively consume. Second it is meant to give Vox, the publisher a way to get valuable feedback from their audience on the value of, and emotional reaction to their content.
The audience member would not have an option to be passive, instead enticing them to take a stance on the information.
Next the synthesis space would prompt the reader based on their emotional response. They would have an opportunity to comment and engage intellectually. If they were genuine in their emotional response then they would likely offer a text based reaction or question though they do have to. A reader could simply just click “Read on”.
These comments could go on to serve a multitude of functions. For one they are much more intimate and personal comment. If news services choose to display them on their article anonymously then there could be a public record of genuine discourse. They could also serve to better understand the audience that is reading their content.
Most importantly though they force the reader themselves to consider what they just read critically.
But is a media corporation the only place this intervention could work?
News aggregators like Feedly, one I use daily, could also benefit from this.
Again the basic interaction model is the same.
But as a reader finishes their article and is prompted with an emotion reaction they begin to interact with a color-based organization of the responses.
Adding their personal text-based feedback remains the same. But the aggregation system offers new opportunities.
Feedly itself has in built exploration system, but with the addition of the qualitative input of it’s readers that system could become very powerful.
Readers could define their own collective stories. The aggregated sentiment and reaction of the readers around specific articles could be represented in this explore feature. This would let a reader see what is important to people in london, and how they feel about it, or what makes the people of Venezuela happy. This input system could also eliminate some of the noise that readers feel is unimportant to the collective consciousness and thus could be presented without the same gravitas as the critical issues of our time.
Emotion and synthesis have always been critical to our ability to develop our society and culture. To exist passively consuming is dangerous. Just look at the power of news reporters who played off our emotion instead of our analytics.
Can we make room for synthesis in our consumption based culture, can there be a place to reflect and think critically about what is being presented to us. If anything these tools can help enable people to be more critical and perhaps even participate in productive, not destructive, discourse.
