Week 12 Reflection

This week I worked a little more on my artifact to go along with my essay. After meeting with Professor Ansari, I have decided to do something that is interactive because I feel like it will be more effective for people to understand the concepts I want to touch on. I want to have an experience that changes the users’ view on their own filter bubbles as well as the polarization in the United States. I think it could be interesting to do something where a user sees a headline and they have to guess what news source it came from or where they are presented with a news story and they have to come up with a headline. I think it could be interesting to explore what people’s political ideologies are, I think it actually may surprise some people. Another idea I had was to build on what I talked about with Professor Ansari about creating a platform that forces you to follow people with opposite political views. It would force you to have a conversation with someone that is different from you. I think it could be interesting to look at what rules a platform like this would have. I feel like it could be misused where people go on just to harass others. I wanted to look and see if either of my ideas has been done before. On my search, I found Red Feed, Blue Feed by the Wall Street Journal, which showed you Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side based on certain topics. It is not being updated now due to Facebook changing its API, but I think it is an interesting take on the concept of polarization. It really puts into perspective the two sides of Facebook. I also found the political compass which is a quiz that tells you where you fall on a political spectrum. I am honestly not sure how reliable it is but I think it could be integrated into my project.

I also found a more reliable quiz from the Pew Research Center. After taking the quiz, I was labeled as a solid liberal which is 16% of the public. However, the last question of the quiz was do you identify yourself as a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent which I thought was interesting and a little bit suspect. I wanted to see if the answer they gave me was different based on what I chose for that question so I took it again. I chose all the same answers except for the last question, I chose Republican instead of Democrat. Like I thought, this time I was labeled as a Market Skeptic Republican which is 12% of the public. I then took it one more time and chose Independent. It then asked a follow-up question of if I wanted to learn more about the Democratic or Republican parties. I went through and chose both answers at different times and it gave me the same answers I got before. I think it is so interesting that quizzes do this. It actually goes a lot with the conversation of filter bubbles. The quiz sort of gives people confirmation bias, it just agrees with who the person thinks they are or which party they identify with which doesn’t help at all. When I develop my artifact I want to focus on making sure that what I create doesn’t fall into this trap of confirming people’s own biases.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on something we talked about in class very briefly which is the white euro-centric views that a lot of museums have in their exhibits. I am taking another class this semester called Museum Accessibility and my semester project is helping museums and historical sites create multiple perspectives for their exhibits so that people can be more informed. We are also focusing on making it accessible for people with disabilities. Right now, I am focusing on an image of logging which was taken on Bainbridge Island. As of right now, the museum only has the perspective of the white logging owner and how they believed logging was great for them. In this project, we wanted to explore how logging impacted other people who were there. We found out about the Suquamish people and how they would use the trees that were being cut down in their everyday lives, so we wanted to find their perspective on logging. We also learned that there were a lot of immigrants who worked for the logging companies so we wanted to get their perspective on it. Lastly, we wanted to get an environmentalist perspective on it. I think it is so interesting that even just one picture has so many stories to tell. The fact that a lot of the time we default to the white eurocentric male point of view is distressing and it really takes away the culture and the stories of the people who were actually involved. I think it is so important for more museums to show more perspectives instead of defaulting to the point of view of colonizers.