In this design fiction we explored several ethical concerns surrounding the Nouvo platform. Indeed, we focused mostly on the opinion heat map – a novel feature where people can compare opinions and read history with their friends. Ultimately people can see who they align with the most and the least. This in combination with our article suggestion algorithm could potentially exacerbate echo chambers to an extreme degree. Therefore it was natural for us to explore the idea of echo chambers at its most extreme in our fiction – users completely exclude others with different opinions from their lives such that they are almost unaware of people that have different opinions. Another interesting scenario we hypothesized was how news outlets would adapt to the fact that Nouvo users only receive content based on their own interests/opinions and the interests of their friends (who we believe will eventually all assimilate to have similar opinions). Just so, we predicted that news outlets may (problematically) publish different versions of the same article to maximize the number of subscribers. In terms of form, we thought that it would be meta to make our design fiction a newspaper. We included several different styles of articles ranging from editorials, blog-like opinion pieces to simple news. To increase engagement we also included games like crosswords, wordsearch and cryptograms that all relate to Nouvo and its broader negative effects. We have also dropped hints of a broader narrative of Betoota being acquired by a Nouvo owned company. This alludes to antitrust issues that already plagues journalism, a problem that we believe will be accentuated if there was a centralized news platform.
