Broadening Exposure to Socio-Political Opinions via a Pushy Smart Home Device

Abstract

Motivated by the effects of the filter bubble and echo chamber phenomena on social media, we developed a smart home device, Spkr, that unpredictably "pushes" sociopolitical discussion topics into the home. The device utilised trending Twitter discussions, categorised by their sociopolitical alignment, to present people with a purposefully assorted range of viewpoints. We deployed Spkr in 10 homes for 28 days with a diverse range of participants and interviewed them about their experiences. Our results show that Spkr presents a novel means of combating selective exposure to socio-political issues, providing participants with identifiably diverse viewpoints. Moreover, Spkr acted as a conversational prompt for discussion within the home, initiating collective processes and engaging those who would not often be involved in political discussions. We demonstrate how smart home assistants can be used as a catalyst for provocation by altering and pluralising political discussions within households.

Generative Echo Chamber? Effect of LLM-Powered Search Systems on Diverse Information Seeking

“…In information retrieval and recommender systems, serendipity is studied as an optimization criterion to increase the exposure to novel and diverse information [54,59]. Many systems were developed to help people encounter diverse perspectives [14,68], deliberate on controversial topics [13,30,48], be aware of one's own information bubble and better control filtering mechanisms [17,27,41]. As Garrett and Resnick [19] argued, to increase people's consumption of attitude-challenging information, the key lies in presenting highquality challenging items in the right context, and/or reducing people's cognitive dissonance.…”

“…People also receive information passively or through scanning. Indeed, prior works argued that conversational search and agent systems have the potential advantage of making individuals more receptive toward proactive interactions from the system [51], and HCI researchers explored leveraging conversational systems such as Alexa to broadcast diverse views [14]. It would be interesting to explore whether conversational interactions enabled by LLMs can effectively act as active nudging for diverse views, and whether they provide benefits over conventional information systems such as news feed and deliberation platforms.…”

What do we study when studying politics anddemocracy?A thematic analysis of how politics and democracy aretreated in SIGCHI conference papers

“…Salehi-Abari and Boutilier, 2015; Le et al, 2017;Nelimarkka et al, 2018;Semaan et al, 2014;Al-Ani et al, 2012;Park et al, 2011;Trevisan et al, 2019;Hemphill and Roback, 2014;Hemphill et al, 2013;Agarwal et al, 2020;Li et al, 2018) (Mahoney et al, 2016;Zubiaga et al, 2013;Maruyama et al, 2014;Kriplean et al, 2014;Pierson, 2015;Rho and Mazmanian, 2020;Le et al, 2017;Semaan et al, 2014) Continued on next page Media consumption "Broadening Exposure to Socio-Political Opinions via a Pushy Smart Home Device" (Feltwell et al, 2020), "Is a polarized society inevitable, where people choose to be exposed to only political news and commentary that reinforces their existing viewpoints?" Golbeck and Hansen (2011) , and "When one searches for political candidates on Google, a panel composed of recent news stories, known as Top stories, is commonly shown at the top of the search results page."…”

Designing Technology-Mediated Peer Support for Postgraduate Research Students at Risk of Loneliness and Isolation

“…Although we have some evidence that this happened (as participants reported conversations around the workbook topics), this was not as prevalent as we had expected and the majority of participants did not openly look at activities shared by others-suggesting this was too personal or voyeuristic-and rarely looked at these activities during meetings. Previous work [23] has shown the effectiveness of delivering different content based on the individual, alternative workbook content, or tailoring of content for each PGR student, could help appropriately communicate desires and manage expectations. Conversational prompts were suggested made by a small number of participants in the study and could represent an alternative solution-guided chats were successfully used to facilitate online "talk therapy" between people experiencing mental illnesses [65], facilitating deep and valuable conversations, but which raised concerns that participants did not want to share-similar to problems we experienced in this study.…”