It would not have helped the Clinton clones (a sense of entitlement makes people tone deaf and fact blind) but C.J. Adams and Izzie Zahorian explore a way to “see” news beyond your usual news bubble.
In If you are reading this, we might be in the same news bubble they write:
In Myanmar we met two journalists who, during a period of military rule, had smuggled newspapers in duffel bags to carry news between their country and the outside world. Their story stuck with us as a sort of personal challenge: these reporters had regularly risked their lives to read a just a few pages of news from outside their country; while we, with all our connectivity, rarely make the effort to do the same.
Even with the power of the internet, it can be surprisingly difficult to explore the diversity of global perspectives. Technology has made it easier for everyone share information, but it hasn’t made us better at finding viewpoints that are distant from our own. In some ways, a duffel bag full of newspapers would include a wider range of perspectives than many of us see on a daily basis.
Search engines, social media and news aggregators are great at surfacing information close to our interests, but they are limited by the set of topics and people we choose to follow. Even if we read multiple news sources every day, what we discover is defined by the languages we are able to read, and the topics that our sources decide to cover. Ultimately, these limitations create a “news bubble” that shapes our perspective and awareness of the world. We often miss out on the chance to connect and empathize with ideas beyond these boundaries.
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How to “see” news without your usual filters?
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We’ve just released a new experiment related to this idea: a data visualization called Unfiltered.News. The viz uses Google News data to show what the daily news topics are being published in every region. Headlines for these topics can be viewed from around the world, with translations provided in 40 languages. We hope the viz can become a useful tool to explore what shapes our different perspectives, and to help users discover topics and viewpoints they would have otherwise missed.
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Push this one up to the top of your “sites/technology to explore” stack!
I’m having a mixed experience on Ubuntu 14.04. Chrome fails altogether, no support for WebGL. Mozilla displays the side bar of headlines but not the graph like presentation of stories.
I also tried to load the site on Windows 7 with IE and got no joy.
Understandable (but disappointing) that the site may be optimized for Windows but to exclude Chrome?
It’s a great idea, hopeful that during this beta shakedown that it becomes more widely accessible.