"I've been manipulated!"

Abstract

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that 'second screening' practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts.

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

“…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." Minneman et al (1998) (Minneman et al, 1998;Baumer et al, 2010;Schwarz and Morris, 2011;Feltwell et al, 2020;Golbeck and Hansen, 2011;Feltwell et al, 2019;Grace and Hone, 2019;Feltwell et al, 2017;Santos and Gurevych, 2018;Park et al, 2009;Munson and Resnick, 2010;Kulshrestha et al, 2017;Gorkovenko et al, 2017;Kawakami et al, 2020;Garrett and Weeks, 2013;Bentley et al, 2019;Diakopoulos et al, 2009;Epstein et al, 2020) (Mckay et al, 2020)…”

Audience and Expert Perspectives on Second Screen Engagement with Political Debates

“…In second screen research, Democratic Replay [37] aimed to tackle trust and public engagement by supporting factchecking and argument visualisation. Spotting Guide and Moral Compass [16] used social tagging, a process of attaching tags to content, to enable more critical viewing of politically charged reality television. Finally, Social Printers [23] explored the possibilities of a physical social network using IoT devices alongside political debates, where they discovered that some issues such as trolling and uncivil behaviour were not observed, while others, such as an echo chamber effect, became amplified.…”

“…By comparison, design research is well-equipped to explore complex, multi-faceted problems that cannot be captured or understood using traditional approaches [47]. Design interventions described above [16,23,37] are examples of how this approach can be used in the second screen space, but do not account for the many stakeholders at work.…”

“…We recruited 18 participants through mailing lists, posters, flyers, political Facebook groups, Twitter, and snowball sampling at each workshop. This relatively small cohort of participants reflects similar qualitative research practices [12,13,16]. The events allowed us to generate 8 hours of in-depth group discussions and 212 written notes generated by the participants.…”

“…To simplify interfaces, workshop participants imagined an agree/disagree interface for rapid feedback, but other possibilities exist. Previous research has explored feedback cards to allow viewers to give nuanced feedback [12] or social tagging as a way to enable critical viewing [16]. New technological developments in the home, such as Internet of Things devices, could help facilitate instant interactions with the debate content and provide an alternative to conventional applications [23].…”