What are Perspectives — and why do they matter?

TL;DR — for the busy ones:

• Through our products at Varia, we are offering Perspectives as a Service, by that we mean providing different points of view, different context on any same topic.
• All issues have two or many more perspectives to them. Our world is not one-dimensional and not as polarized as parts of media or politics make you believe.
• You should consider everything a perspective, even your own way to see things is based on your mental model of reality — which, as everybody else’s, should be challenged regularly.

Whenever we talk about Varia and our solutions for longer than an elevator pitch, there is a high probability that a question in the likes of “but what is a perspective, how do you define it?” comes up. This is one of many good questions to ask, so let us look at definitions:

Perspective — commonly defined as: a particular way of considering something, or as a particular way of viewing things that depends on one’s experience and personality (Cambridge Dictionary).

We largely agree with this definition and with that, also acknowledge that there are in theory infinitely many perspectives around a certain topic. While these infinitely many will not differ much, in some cases, there are certainly more perspectives than only two — which is often a kneejerk assumption that people have, when they think about political topics. It is tempting to see the political world as this one-dimensional battle between liberal and conservative. But such a view on politics does not do it justice — not politics, nor any other topic.

Many initiatives or platforms that try to work on the issues of echo chambers and filter bubbles, follow an approach of labelling news outlets on source level according to their political affiliation — on that one-dimensional spectrum. In our view, such an approach has two fundamental flaws: apart from considering the perspective-space as only one-dimensional, it also assumes that all articles of a certain news outlet will adhere to the same political affiliation. This is of course not the case, although some news publishers sadly go indeed towards that direction — but let’s dig into that later, it’s worth at least one whole other post.

Given our definition of perspectives and their multi-dimensional and near infinite nature, we have decided to consider each document individually (independent of its source) and set each document up against another document on the same topic. This allows us to compare papers, posts, articles against each other — see if they are indeed on the same topic — and where their perspectives differ from each other.

Our world is more complex than pro and contra. We need to tolerate large amounts of ambiguity around certain, or most, topics. Each of us, the media included, are tempted to heuristically frame topics in these two polarizing arguments, while in most cases there is no black or white. Reality consists not only of fifty shades of grey, reality is almost always way more colorful. In order to appreciate this breath of colors and perspectives, we need to realize that all information is a perspective — hence there is at least one other, to every perspective you hold.

Serving other perspectives up, where ever they are needed, is what we understand by Perspectives as a Service; to make different perspectives available everwhere, to everyone. This is only possible through an automated solution, there cannot be human curation for all possible topics to have perspectives on. The limited scalability of human curation many times leads back to the temptation to frame issues as pro vs. contra. As said, this ignores the ambiguity that is inherent to many issues — and further, it can backfire regarding intentions to combat filter bubbles, as this study highlights. Just bluntly showing opposing points of views is not going to solve the filter bubble issue, quite the contrary, it can even promote antagonism.

The consideration of different perspectives is necessary to understand the full story. This applies to individuals who want to get a broader view on news topics, just as well, as to journalists who want to quickly understand what the hot topics of their assigned story are — or to corporate decision makers, who have to consider different perspectives, when they aim to make well informed decisons.

Alongside our own experiences, surveys and experiments, we have collected a large amount of articles and scientific literature on these topics, hit me up, if you are interested.

Here some articles & studies to get you going on the topic:

• Towards more diversity in news recommendation systems
• How blunt exposure to opposing views on social media can increase polarization
• Journalism in the age of populism and polarization — LSE study about the Italian migration debate

Below you can see a visualization of one of the first steps in our algorithmic approach beind Perspectives as a Service: Topic Clustering. Only if two articles are on the same topic, they are perspectives relative to each other. Otherwhise, they are just two random pieces of text. I am happy to dive deeper into our process later on — let me know if you are interested!

This article was researched and written using Varia Research