ELECTION DAY

Election Day is a project centered around the concept of Choice in the present day world placed in the setting of 2019 General Elections in India - the largest festival of democracy on earth.

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“Choice” has become a matter of utmost concern for the citizens of the digital age. Freedom of choice has become one of the most common phrases thrown around in topics of discussion, debates, and writings, along with other words like “privacy” and “net neutrality”. These terms together have created a hotbed of discussions worldwide, from individuals to corporates and governments.

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With the largest ever (3.9 billion as of 2018) and still rapidly increasing number of internet users globally today, these issues have become the concern of every individual inhabiting the planet. Whether the exponentially increasing internet user base and the rapid innovations in digital technology will have a positive impact on the world or not is a much hazy answer to determine right now, however its impacts are cascading and are cumulatively affecting humanity day by day subtly in ways that we hardly ever notice.

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This project is created around a prominent theme of the digital age - Confirmation Bias.

Confirmation bias in simple words as put out on Wikipedia is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

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Confirmation bias has also formed the founding principle of social media. Algorithms on every social network are designed to collect and analyze what we engage with and subsequently fetch for us only the content we like to interact with. This is a flawed basis for such platforms of networking since it not only hides away from us the complete picture and distorts facts, but also leads us into believing that our opinions are the best/what’s true. On the other hand it is a golden tool for us to filter from the multitude of information available to us.

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With the Indian General Election for 2019 coming up, every day tons of content is generated online on political developments and trends. As a nation of around 500 million internet users, the impact of data circulated online multiplies by leaps.

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Election Day depicts three sources of developing trends and news in the country this election season, each designed the same way but the information is different depending on the political stance of the reader. It depicts the world of confirmation bias we are surrounded with all the time.

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While Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi are pitched as the two main opponents and candidates for Prime Ministership in India, a large number of cricket devouts are actively engrossed in the developments in the Indian Premier League 2019, which will be held parallelly to the General elections.

 

Election Day presents three different worlds respectively to the supporters of Modi, the supporters of Rahul, and the cricket fans and people who have a primary interest other than politics.

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The inspiration for this project has been directly taken from the project "A Vote Day" by François Devambez.