Seemingly an old TV box which turns out to offer an abundance of control over content selection: each aspect of news can be selected for using old-style controls. The main goal is to make people aware of their choices and biases and to make them curious to tune the controls and to watch something different. Hitting the TV resets the controls to random values and lets user discover completely new unexpected content.
The main underlying assumption behind the idea of YouTune is that while it is very difficult to influence people’s opinions and change their beliefs explicitly without a willingness on their part to change these beliefs, we could attempt to influence people implicitly by providing a tool that, first, would make users aware of the choices they take: to watch what they want or are used to, the user has to explicitly set controls. Unlike traditional broadcast and online media platforms, YouTune does not allow users to select content based on channel or program, so in order to find content that the person is usually interested in, with YouTune they would need to manually select characteristics of the content they want to watch. And second, we believe that YouTune will make people curious to change the control values they are used to and therefore to discover unexpected content that could potentially influence their opinions in an implicit way.
With YouTune the user can choose between different characteristics and tune into some value of the chosen characteristic to see short news stories. The idea is to make statistics experienceable without showing graphs: a person using YouTune would subconsciously aggregate statistical patterns and understand which tricks and stylistic tools channels tend to use to cover certain topics.
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