The proposed project will make up the pilot case study for a PhD, which is conducted in partnership with the BBC Research and Development. It will tackle the themes of user agency and identity in implicitly personalised media content. This topic is highly relevant in light of the BBC’s efforts to implement personalisation in their news content.
The aim is to elicit participants’ feelings around personalised content curation by juxtaposing their uniquely generated feeds with their calculated user profiles after interacting with a low fidelity system featuring commonly used personalisation and audience segmentation techniques. Structured interviews will give an insight into the participants’ feelings around identity and agency when confronted with personalisation and user profile generation/audience segmentation. Furthermore, through the participants’ feedback, ideas for improved personalisation will be identified whilst considering the risks of creating filter bubbles.
