Title: Shifting scales on common ground: developing personal expressions and public opinions

Authors: Mike Ananny, Carol Strohecker, Kathleen Biddick

Addresses: Everyday Learning, Media Lab Europe, Sugar House Lane, Bellevue, Dublin-8, Ireland. ' Everyday Learning, Media Lab Europe, Sugar House Lane, Bellevue, Dublin-8, Ireland. ' Department of History, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA

Abstract: We present an approach and a tool for helping individuals express small story-like expressions of personal perspectives in the context of larger, collage-like incubators of public opinions. Our goal is to work with people to create technologically supported public discourse spheres in which they can both represent personal views and practice new ways of forming collective opinions. We present the design and use of one public sphere system, TexTales, a large-scale photographic installation to which people can send SMS text message captions. We review one community’s experiences with TexTales, and discuss the insights we gained about how residents scale and ground their civic discourse and move between expressions of individual perspectives and public opinions.

Keywords: public opinion; civic discourse; multimodal interfaces; intermodal literacies; SMS text messages; interactive community projection; citizen journalism; collective opinions; personal opinions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2004.006019

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2004 Vol.14 No.6, pp.484 - 505

Published online: 21 Jan 2005 *

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