COMO: Clarifying Obfuscated Media Ownership

Courtenay Bird, Adam Rice and Jasper Sluijs

Because media affect all of us, and most information that reaches our society is mediated, we believe that it is important for everyone to know about ownership structures is media. As a basic premise, we hypothesized that many 'ordinary' people have some idea about media ownership, but that their understanding and critical consumption of media would be enhanced by a better knowledge of who actually owns the media.  Our aims for developing this web application were strongly supported by a preliminary study we held.

Our goal for this project was therefore to visualize structures of media ownership in a web application, so that users could develop an understanding of who owns the media they consume. The user can click and choose different ways to visualize structures of ownership, and can drag the nodes around. Clicking on a particular node will link to the respective companies’ websites.

We believe that the ability for users to playfully interact with this complex visualization, allows them to actively grasp the paradoxical nature of ownership in media. Users are able to trace back the origins of many media they might consume on a daily basis, and draw their own conclusions on how concentrated or diverse their media consumption patterns are.