Throughout this development process for my partner, Meita and I, we have stumbled upon heaps of ideas that made it difficult to determine which one will be suitable to explore and how to present it. But, after multiple research and brainstorming, we found that the two qualities we are approaching more towards are: interactivity and cross-platform.

Firstly, our project will be in a form of a simulation that is treated like an online quiz or a game. We wanted to inform the user how powerful the Internet can be when it comes to, acquiring and influencing their personal view and identity. Since this is a small-scale project we created a simulation of simply how the Internet functions, more specifically when it comes to, customising content inspired by Eli Pariser’s point of ‘filter bubbles’ and Manovich’s ‘New Media’, specifically the variability characteristic.

Moreover, we decided to augment this simulation with a focus on the Facebook news feed and obtaining news from there. We created a scenario that involves the user being an American citizen during the 2017 U.S presidential election. With this scenario, the intended ‘Internet’ will acquire general information about the user such as their name, age, gender, etc. After that, the simulation will bring the user to examine if they like or dislike certain real-life events including, change of laws, protests, etc. in the U.S at that time. The purpose of this is to identify the user’s intent by gathering relevant information regarding their political views. This leads to a final Facebook news feed of articles from other sources or web pages that ONLY reinforces their views. Therefore, completely personalised and customised.

In the case of our small-scale project, the definition of interactivity and cross-platform is a combination of the research and projects we have looked at. First of all, interactivity in this context relates to how the user is able to engage with the content we put out by utilising their views to examine their likes and dislikes. As shown in Do.Not.Track project and Manovich’s notion of variability, the existence of hypermedia links are what created the notion of interactivity.

As Manovich (2001, p.38) argues “In hypermedia, the multimedia elements making a document are connected through hyperlinks. Thus the elements are the structure are independent of each other – rather than hard-wired together, as in traditional media”.

Whilst, Do.Not.Track is guided by a storyteller and a few episodes, our simulation is just short game. The ways in which the user has to play the game to see the end of it, through interacting with multiple hypermedia in our simulation, is the interactivity we try to put forward.

Then, when users get to the end, all the contents that we assume they will empathise with, are on their personalised news feed. To gain more information and engage with more of what the contents are about the users will have to click on the ‘news’ desired and that will link to another form of source or page or app. Therefore, this navigation is where our cross-platform quality stands.

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REFERENCES:
Manovich, L 2001, The Language of New Media, The MIT Press, Massachusetts.