Politics and the news have always been topics to avoid at the dinner table to avoid family arguments.
But in 2020, we've moved back into our childhood rooms and spent more time at home than ever before. It's forced us to have the difficult conversations with our parents on identity, race, and politics. It feels like the media constantly focuses on the political fissures between the younger and older generations, but having these conversations with our parents, made us realize there was more common ground than we had initially thought.
We've compared our generation to our parent's generation to uncover more similarities than we had previously thought. We've chosen Generation Z to represent us and the Baby Boomers to represent our parents. We've summarized the first few decades of each generation, highlighting some of the events during our most formative years.
And while it feels like our lives now our incomparable to the lives our parents lead, many of the key events are the same.
What's next?
We've taken a look at each generation and saw how they have more in
common than one would think.
We hope that the story told here between GenZers and Boomers will be
remembered even beyond this visualization. While we may have
contrasting viewpoints and news sources, our stories are still built
together. Our media, political leanings, and even lifestyles can be
different, but we can learn from one another and bridge the gap.
Methodology.
The methodology for our scrolly telly was to start off with
demographic facts and historical events to paint a picture of who the
Generation Z and Baby Boomers were. By giving background information,
the reader can better grasp what events shaped each generation and
perhaps even gain insight into the reasoning for media choices and
political leanings. Next, we take a deeper dive into the media sources
and biases of both generations to compare the similarities and
differences. Before opening up the Martini Glass in the final
visualization, we add an area chart to highlight political ideologies
as well as interesting comparisons between the wording of headlines in
the news sources of each generation. In the final unit visualization,
the reader can build a hypothetical person to explore their newsfeed.
Here, the reader can visualize the different news sources that people
of different demographics tend to look at and compare them to their
own news sources. Each created person's feed is generated based on
survey results from real people. Furthermore, readers can hover over
each article and see the article header and additional recommended
articles from other news sources with different media biases. This is
one of the bridges we have included: the reader has easy access to
articles of the same topic that people of other political leanings may
read.
Limitations.
We recognize that the selection of people and their corresponding news
intake is not fully representative of all the people in that
demographic. There are definitely people and news sources that we have
missed or were not able to include within the scope of this project.
We apologize if we missed any major news sources or made any
simplifying generalizations. We tried to consider as many different
perspectives and ideologies as possible and avoid introducing bias
while processing the data, but we acknowledge that there still may be
assumptions we made. There were too many articles, sources, people,
and variables to consider all of them within the scope of this
project. However, we hope that this visualization still creates an
awareness and even appreciation for the different news that others may
read.
Future Work.
Instead of highlighting more generations (i.e. Millennials), we
narrowed the scope to GenZ and Boomers, which most closely represents
our generation and our parents generation. In future work, it could
definitely be interesting to add more generations to explore.
Ultimately, our goal would continue to be bridging the gaps in
perspectives and encouraging people to try to read more about opposing
views.
