Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere

Abstract

Little is known about the challenges and successes people face when piecing together multiple social media to interact in the online public sphere when: seeking information, disseminating information, and engaging in political discussions. We interviewed 29 US citizens and conducted 17 talk-out-loud sessions with people who were using one or more social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact in the online public sphere. We identified a number of challenges and workarounds related to public sphere interactions, and used our findings to formulate requirements for new political environments that support the interactions in the public sphere. Through evolving requirements generation, we developed a new political deliberation technology, dubbed Poli, which is an integrated social media environment with the potential to enable more effective interactions in the public sphere. We discuss several remaining questions and limitations to our tool that will drive future work.

Social Printers

“…The commentary posted during live debates is an emotional reaction to what is happening on screen and often focuses on the 'theatre of politics' [31,40,43]. Such use of second screens for political discourse is even present outside election periods [2,35]. For example, the BBC's Question Time has recorded over 800 tweets per minute during a particularly high-profile debate [2].…”

Politics at Home

“…However, despite the promise of social media for political engagement, users experience numerous concerns when it comes to contributing online. These include privacy worries, that self-expression is difficult, it costs time and energy, it can be uncivil [3], that they may receive a negative reaction, that it doesn't suit their online identity, or they fear sounding ignorant [23].…”

“…Although our sample size is relatively small, this was necessary to capture in-depth experiences as opposed to more shallow observations, and our qualitative approach is modelled on other similar work into second screens [19] and social media in political deliberation [23]. We approach this work not with the intention of contributing a definitive picture of second screen behaviours, but rather to develop insights into current usage that can be used to design new applications and interfaces for engagement with debates.…”

“…Existing research in the area has focused on how Twitter is utilised alongside debates, including analysis of its main users [2], how it is used by politicians [2,15,16], the language characteristics of the tweets themselves [1,6,26] and the hindrances of using it for political deliberation [3,23]. However, less apparent is the initial motivation of viewers for making use of second screens alongside debates.…”

Rethinking civic computing in China

“…Personalization (Mobasher, Cooley, & Srivastava, 2000) and recommender systems (Resnick & Varian, 1997) automatically tailor incoming information for people, limiting the opportunity to engage with diverse values and opinions. Civic computing researchers have begun to examine whether social media use increases political polarization (Semaan, Faucett, Robertson, Maruyama, & Douglas, 2015;Semaan et al, 2014). My participants sought to avoid reading distorted information by reading from a variety of media.…”