Reading and Reviewing - 3rd Part

My own personal thoughts on both texts

After summarising both texts, I feel I now have a better understanding of Interactive Voting Systems and the way the public feels about interactive voting. These two subjects have a loose connection to my design idea to create a simple electronic voting device connected to the TV for television viewers to vote on future episodes for soaps series.

It is hard to make comparisons between the two texts as they are both looking at different aspects but both still relate towards interactive voting as well as improving my understanding of both topics. Both pieces of research show that their ideas are credible through their extensive experiments they did. The role of source confusion text draws attention to people watching television and adopting this distorted view of social reality, so when voting for specific storylines, in my design idea, it would seem appropriate to suggest realistic events. The purpose of allowing the public to decide on a storyline, which is more linked to the real world, is to make television soaps more appealing, so people can relate to them, not to encourage the adoption of a televised perception of reality. The implication for concern is that if television strengthens the cultivation effect that the world is a dangerous place, then people’s judgements based on that may restrict what they do and affect how they view others. This brings my attention to the other text – people are more likely to take part in an interactive vote if what they are voting for is believable and interests them. Providing a simple electronic voting system to vote for realistic issues and displaying immediate feedback from the public will hopefully encourage viewers to want to watch more reality based dramas, which will create less fiction-to-news confusions. Having read about the connection between TV viewing and social reality judgements it makes me realise that soap stories should try to depict as true to real life scenarios as possible, based on reliable sources. In this era, it would be impossible to depopularise television but perhaps it is the responsibility of TV companies to try and make news and fiction programmes less visually similar to reduce the potential for confusion for viewers, (as proved by the study), and to consider more carefully the way people are portrayed in, say, soaps to keep the story lines more true to the real world.

After reading into the electronic voting system text I would say that when casting an interactive vote, keeping it simple and less complex is best so that there will be a higher degree of accuracy and errors are less likely to affect the outcome. If a large percentage of the final vote was collated from viewers accidently clicking the wrong button so casting unintentional votes, then this might stop people from voting in the future for which storyline they want to see ,so defeating the purpose of having this opportunity to involve lots of viewers. The answer is to keep the device simple and not show too many options on the screen as confusion may lead to frustration and then loss of concentration and interest. If the storylines were more reality based it might also pull in more light television viewers, so making television soaps even stickier, which was the initial reason for creating this Interactive Voting System.