The media decides what and how to communicate through a specific agenda-setting that changes according to different editorial positions, events and topics. Terrorism is one of the most controversial topic and each terrorist event could open the debate again. For what concerns the video-news produced by terrorist groups, the media receives an already-made news and they can choose how to share it with the audience. The web reflects all these dynamics, it is the place where the controversy takes place and that gathers all of the people's reactions.
The controversy is particularly burning in the United States, where on one side there is a massive repression online but it is also the place where the most known uncensored video platform come from. The events analysed are 7, selected from the ISIS video news spread online, from 2o14 to 2015.
What’s the exhibition about?
The jordanian Pilot
Muath Al-Kasasbeh was a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot who was captured and burned to death the 3rd January 2015 by the militant jihadist group ISIS after his aircraft crashed over Syria.
The decision to choose this events comes from the huge resonance it gained all over the media. It becomes the simplified simulation of the choosing process. How do you want to be informed about the event? Would you like to watch the original video to receive an uncensored information or do you prefer a censored video version?
The purpose of the exhibition is to display how the contents spread online and which is the role of each one in the phenomenon through a first-person and collective-informational experience. So, the main elements of the concept are choice, availability and visibility. The concept is based on the interaction between the three elements: is the personal choice affecting the general availability and visibility of the contents?
Choices treemap
What happens when you have to choose your own information? Which elements affect your choice and which are the consequences? Nowadays, everyone can define his own “editorial policy” but what happens when they are going to indirectly affect the choices of other people? The “choices book” is a collection of treemaps based on the choices of the first- person experience. Each page is the result of a user choice. If you gothrough the book, you can see the map changes, such as the news visibility changes.
Choices treemap
What happens when you have to choose your own information? Which elements affect your choice and which are the consequences? Nowadays, everyone can define his own “editorial policy” but what happens when they are going to indirectly affect the choices of other people? The “choices book” is a collection of treemaps based on the choices of the first- person experience. Each page is the result of a user choice. If you gothrough the book, you can see the map changes, such as the news visibility changes.
How do you want to be informed?
The exhibition is based on the metaphor of the projection. In particular, there is a central black box where the 1st person-experience takes place, that symbolizes the personal choice of the information. The other elements are designed as projection of the main cube . The panels are the higher-level reflections of the phenomenon. They contains some infographics displaying the contents availability and visibility, focusing on the audience and the sources.
The black box
The black box is the place where the first-person experience takes place. When you enter the cube, you can start the experience on a laptop. Firstly, you are informed about the event, the death of the jordanian pilot, and then, you can choose how to be informed selecting a news extract by source and level of censorship. In the end, you can listen to the video-news and visit the website to see the results of the experience published.
The projections
The informational stage is composed by two main visualizations. The purpose is to inform about the diffusion of the video-news based on their availability. The graphic panels in the exhibition are designed as two projections of the black box, the first one showing the audience perspective of the phenomenon, and the second one, the video-sources perspective. The purposes of this stage are two: firstly, to inform the audience on the videos’ diffusion and distribution, and secondly, to show every one’s choices are one of the factors that help building the official information.
What is the role of your choice?
1— Online Session
“I watched the uncensored video but It wasn’t new to me, I want to be fully informed without any filter”
— comment by F.C. after the experience
What happen on the treemap when you choose a certain information? The experience end with a specific sentence “Your choice will contribute to increase the visibility of this video”. The purpose of the experience is getting the user aware of his power of choice. The treemap changes after every single choice and the square selected becomes bigger and bigger as well as the cluster in which it is contained.
The videos are categorized by levels of censorship using different colors. The pink squares are safe contents, that means video-news reported by journalists without showing graphic or violent content. The red squares are the censored contents, that means graphic contents censored in the most cruel parts by the video-sources. The dark red squares, instead, are sentitive contents, reported without any filters on them, as they were produced by the terrorist groups.
2— Polimi Session
What is the higher-level situation?
Contents Distribution
Which web-sources distribute the video news? How much of the original videos are they willing to display?
The visualization demonstrates how the videos are distributed by different sources by level of censorship and date. The platforms selected are those that appear on the first-page of a Google Video search for the 7 selected events. The colors refer to the three levels of censorship, from censored news-pink squares to uncensored contents-dark red squares.
Contents Visibility
What happens when you search for ISIS news on Google Video? Which content is displayed first? The visualization is the result of an analysis on the top 50 results on Google Video related to the 7 selected events. Each line represents a video, with the colors representing the level of censorship. Pink corresponds to safe and red corresponds to sensitive while the grey squares show unavailable content. The columns are ordered chronologically by the date of the event and the position refers to the Google ranking, from 1 to 50.
