Eyewitness Storytelling

Before the mid-crit we had an idea of a project based on a future scenario. Based on trends within the media industry and journalistic eyewitness-related work, we created a future in which we found some specific problems which we went about solving. This resulted in great feedback at the mid-crit presentation where we really felt that we understood where we wanted to go in the continuation of our project. More in detail, the feedback was about trying to view the future more optimistically, focus on distinguishing ourselves from the POV group, focus on what rather than why in association with eyewitness stories, simplify the extremely intricate deep learning algorithm concept, and more. Basically, they liked the presentation and some elements within it - but some things need revisiting and rethinking.

During this week we’ve taken the feedback from the mid-crit into consideration and continued developing the concept based on this. From the Swedish government’s study Medieutredningen we’ve been able to further distinguish what the future holds for media consumption, content creation, and distribution. From this research we can clearly state that there will be no journalists and journalistic work, as we see it today. All journalistic eyewitness content will be created by people in social media platforms. Here we see an opportunity to organize an abundance of unorganized shared information. Instead of having a deep learning algorithm determining whether or not some information is true or false, we create a concept in which an algorithm will create news from various sources of co-creation content in social media.

For now, we will continue developing the concept, further focusing on the visualization of the concept - and how it would be implemented in practice. Also, we will focus on understanding the future in which this algorithm would be present, rather than focusing on creating a company that sells this service. Since the idea is still at its early phase, even though we feel the background is solid (research on our future scenario), we will of course for the weeks to come also focus on fishing out the flaws and perfecting our idea. Malin! We would asap like to know how much and what to begin writing in the project text to be handed in in december.