SOCIAL NEWS : CROWD-SOURCED NEWS FROM SOCIAL TRENDS

Abstract: During the last decade, social media has had a great impact on the way we communicate. It has also expanded our awareness of the world.! However it has become harder for the lay person to find news, because of too many conflicting interests in the mass media industry on one hand, and simply too much free information available on the other! This report documents my study of how social media has affected the way we collect, consume and share news. I describe how democratization of information has made some things easy, but some other things hard - filtering data to find meaningful content has become harder! My studies were targeted mainly at people younger than 30, and mainly in India, and much of its design is informed by problems characteristic to the Indian context. So while I do not explicitly target my end result at the Indian market, a news network by its very nature needs to be global, and this process reflects that.! I go on to use Design Methods including Brainstorming, Participatory Workshops and Service Design theory to arrive at a product that aims to provide people a way to stay up to date with meaningful and relevant news. ! I propose a social network for individuals to exchange news with each other. I try to understand what makes some pieces of information more important than others, and how a network can self filter information so that participants can get high quality content.! In the final result, I describe the framework of this network and how people would contribute to it and consume from it.