Speakers Corner

David Turnbull /

For my 3rd year Digital Media Project I want to create something that will help communication in politics. Recent years have shown how polarised politics have become, everyone thinking that the other side of the argument only exists because of stupidity; this project aims to increase communication between political sides, and to reinforce the dialogue between the public and their representatives.

The following is my proposal for this project, with the working title Speakers Corner;

What is the intended idea/concept of the project?

A website intended for the general public to contact their MP’s (or other politicians) via an open letter available for anyone to read, other users will be able to reply to that open letter sending all replies to MP’s offices. Each reply a letter receives will boost its score on the website, with moderators removing minimal effort posts only used for vote manipulation. The website would serve as a forum where the most vocal issues rise to the top, allowing MP’s to prioritise the biggest issues perceived by the public.

Describe the intended audience:

The general public of all ages that are interested in contacting their MPs and amicable political debates. The website would remain neutral in its political alignment and actively fight against vote manipulation, something that is seemingly common in social media. Different political views would not be divided but encouraged to communicate and so opinions aggressive or hostile to others political views would be discouraged, along with any racism or bigotry. As those things are unnecessary for an effective political discussion.

The website’s design would be intended for simplicity of use to attract as diverse an audience as possible. The site would be based in the UK, aimed at only the UK public and MPs, however I would like to look into the potential of expanding to other countries later in the project.

How will this project extend your creative and technical skills?

I will design and build a prototype of the entire website, skills I would have to develop would involve designing assets using illustrator and after effects, along with learning HTML programming at an intermediate level. Database programming would be involved with the full working website, however for the initial prototype the basic functions of the website would be the intention.

Outline how the practical work will be carried out and the time-scales involved for each task. (If working in a group, please also indicate the division of labour):

Weeks 3- 4: Creating a website plan: Initial designs for the website on paper, seeking feedback through market research and refining designs. Also during these weeks I will be researching how to keep the website politically neutral in the face of those who would want otherwise along with researching political issues for use as topic categories on the site.

Weeks 5 – 8: Design: These weeks I will be designing all planned assets with adobe Illustrator, photoshop and after effects as per the plan from weeks 3 and 4. Branding for the site will be finalised during these weeks

Weeks 9 – 11: Produce prototype site: These weeks will be dedicated to applying the assets to the site, programming the HTML and creating any additional assets using Adobe Dreamweaver.

Weeks 12 – 13: Refine and evaluation: These weeks I will refine the design based on feedback from my target audience and evaluate the project as a whole.

What other work (by animators, designers, film-makers, writers, digital media producers, etc.) is relevant to your project? (This work may either be relevant for its conceptual, inspirational or technical similarity):

Inspiration for this project came from using Reddit.com, Reddit has some sections of its website revolve around political debates. However the voting system of the site (one click to upvote) allows for a huge amount of vote manipulation, those with differing political views are divided into separate sections of the site. This creates an issue of ‘Echo-chambers’ where any outsider’s opinion is demoted.

List at least two critical texts that are relevant to your conceptual intentions:

Broersma, M. and Graham, T., 2012. Social media as beat: Tweets as a news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Journalism Practice, 6(3), pp.403-419.

This article contains information about how the public of the UK and Holland used social media as a news source, however unreliable they may be. This applies to this project as the intention is to replace social media as an outlet to voice your political opinions, as many of these sites are designed to expose its users only to like-minded people.

‘they felt that Facebook postings, You Tube videos, blogs, opinionated talk shows and fake news provided background information and perspectives that enabled them to understand the larger meanings of political events and develop their own opinions’ – Marchi, R., 2012. With Facebook, blogs, and fake news, teens reject journalistic “objectivity”. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 36(3), pp.246-262.

This article explores how today’s youth will favour social media as a reliable news source, having many say they are exposed to more diverse opinions and so are able to formulate their own political views through that.

Bakshy, E., Messing, S. and Adamic, L.A., 2015. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), pp.1130-1132.

These researchers have explored how fakebook’s algorithms have a lesser impact on political polarization than the choices of individuals. I believe those that wish to seek amicable political discourse have very few options however.

“Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.” – Barberá, P., Jost, J.T., Nagler, J., Tucker, J.A. and Bonneau, R., 2015. Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?. Psychological science, 26(10), pp.1531-1542.

To offer a different opinion on the diversity of social media’s political discussion, this article illustrates how many overestimate the polarisation of social media. This is something to consider in market research.

Any other information not covered previously:

Speakers corners are common places well known throughout the world, there is one in Hyde park in London where people would voice their opinions on public issues, this website would intend to emulate those corners.

Backup idea’s

The limitations of this project come in when considering the issues MPs may face with accepting the site as a means to communicate. Something I won’t know about for sure until I contact them, so as a backup plan I propose to continue with the Speaker’s Corner, but remove the MP contact functionality and have the site as a form of social network that’s main selling point would be impartial coverage of the issues covered by open letters as something that is sought after currently is a reliable news source. If the site became popular enough MPs may check in as an unofficial means of hearing about topics.

The site will involve learning Javascript and Jquery and so I may face limitations in how I can pick up the language, because of this a 2nd backup project proposal would be to aggregate and curate news sources to offer a news site that offers articles to cover all sides of any current topic.

When a story breaks this site would collate news sources from typically right wing papers like the Daily Mail and The Times, along with left wing papers like the Guardian and link to them all through a single page dedicated to the topic. The aim would be for users to easily access more information on it and be able to formulate their own opinions with less bias.