The Echo Chamber: John Boyne

Product Information

Fletcher, R., Newman, N., & Schulz, A. (2020c). A mile wide, an inch deep: Online news and media use in the 2019 UK general election. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Barberá, P. (2015). How social media reduces mass political polarization. Evidence from Germany, Spain, and the US. Unpublished manuscript. Powered by John Boyne's characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. In this Q&A with him, the bestselling author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas spoke to The Penguin Post about his favourite book this year, cancel culture and his advice for finding your voice as a writer.

Whether echo chambers and the like work broadly in the same ways around science issues as around more conventionally political issues. Single-platform studies are, as noted, of limited value in identifying echo chambers, but there are several important studies that identify like-minded communities formed on individual social media platforms – whether through algorithmic selection, self-selection, or some combination thereof (Bakshy et al. 2015; Barberá et al. 2015; Kaiser and Rauchfleisch 2020; Vaccari et al. 2016). Even these, however, often conclude, like Barberá (2015, p. 28), that “most social media users receive information from a diversity of viewpoints.” And in the absence of evidence on what other media the individuals involved use in addition to the social media platform in question, these studies simply cannot establish whether people inhabit a bounded, enclosed media space where specific messages are magnified and insulated from rebuttal. Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W., Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Fallin Hunzaker, M. B., Lee, J., Mann, M., Merhout, F., & Volfovsky, A. (2018). Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9216–9221. In summary, public discussions around science online may exhibit some of the same dynamics as those observed around politics – with an important role for self- selection, elite cues, and small highly active communities with strong views in explaining the dynamics of these debates – but fundamentally, while important studies have been published, mostly from the US, there is at this stage limited empirical research on the possible existence, size, and drivers of echo chambers in public discussions around science. More broadly, years of research document the role political elites play in shaping both news coverage and public opinion around science issues as well. Conclusion ↑ In the UK, the proportion of people estimated to be in a left-leaning echo chamber is around 2% and the proportion in a right-leaning echo chamber is around 5% (Fletcher et al. 2021b). This is slightly lower than in most of the other countries covered in the study. In most other cases, a minority of around 5% of people only use news sources with ideological slants in one direction. The US is the main outlier among the seven and the only one where more than 10% of the respondents are estimated to rely only on partisan news sources. In every country covered by this study, many more internet users consume no online news at all on a regular basis than inhabit politically partisan echo chambers.Hindman, M. (2018). The internet trap: How the digital economy builds monopolies and undermines democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deny the Fallen have returned with a brand new 8 song release that will definitlely hit the mark for many a metal head in 2023. It’s been 4 years since their debut album was released and for some of us we started to wondered if it would be a one off. With a sound not unlike modern day metal juggernaut Mastodon.

Scheufele, D. A., Jamieson, K. H., & Kahan, D. M. (2017). Conclusion – on the horizon: The changing science communication environment. In K. H. Jamieson, D. M. Kahan, & D. A. Scheufele (eds.), The Oxford handbook on the science of science communication, 461–467. Oxford: Oxford University Press. In Europe, public service media often help bridge these gaps, with differences between those with low interest and high interest being smaller in countries like the UK that have widely used public service media (Castro-Herrero et al. 2018). But many people self-select away from politics and news, choosing entertainment content instead (Prior 2005), and people with more limited levels of formal education and lower levels of income generally use less news than more privileged parts of the population (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen 2018). Each family member has their own storyline, but the key one is an offensive tweet sent by George. It’s never quite clear whether George was thoughtless or deliberately set out to offend (although there was a conversation shortly before said tweet which leads the reader to infer he knew what he was doing). Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Some of the issues we discuss – around echo chambers, polarisation, and inequality – for example, raise moral and political questions and sometimes capture serious societal challenges. Our purpose here is not to outline normative positions on these but to summarise the relevant evidence. This is important to keep in mind because analytical terms such as echo chambers and polarisation often have a negative ring, but their implications of course depend on the substantive nature of the information echoed or the issues that polarise opinion. Basic descriptive facts about media use ↑

Listen to our podcast!

Nelson, J. L., & Webster, J. G. (2017). The myth of partisan selective exposure: A portrait of the online political news audience. Social Media + Society, 3(3). First, a large number of empirical studies documenting that echo chambers are smaller than commonly assumed, and a growing amount of research rejecting the filter bubble hypothesis should not be confused with a Panglossian belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds or that our increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environment does not come with any serious societal challenges. There are many, including the frequently overlooked fact of pronounced inequality in news and information use documented by many of the studies reviewed here, as well as a multitude of others, such as widespread online harassment and abuse, various kinds of misinformation, often invasive data collection by dominant platforms, a serious disruption of the established business of news and market concentration, and many more issues beyond the scope of this review. Social scientists use the term echo chamber to describe a particular situation some people are in as a result of media supply, distribution, and/or their own demand – namely one where they occupy what Jamieson and Capella in their influential book Echo Chamber defined as “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal” (2008, p. 76). The magnification part is typically taken to be a preponderance of attitude-consistent information (e.g., people on the left seeking out information that reinforces their pre-existing views) and the insulation part about the absence of cross-cutting exposure (e.g., people on the right not coming across centrist or left- wing perspectives that challenge their pre-existing views).

Polarisation, in social science, refers to divisions between groups. It can be used to describe a situation where divisions are already sufficiently large to be considered polarised, or a process whereby divisions are becoming larger over time (even though they may still be quite small). Polarisation can take many forms and is not always intrinsically problematic (some things are worth disagreeing over, see Kreiss 2019). Fletcher, R., Cornia, A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2020a). How polarized are online and offline news audiences? A comparative analysis of twelve countries. International Journal of Press/Politics, 25(2), 169–195. I enjoyed writing the character of Beverley Cleverley, the romantic novelist who hires a ghost-writer to write her books for her. Beverley has little or no interest in literature but takes herself incredibly seriously. Over more than twenty years of publishing novels, I’ve met so many different writers at literary festivals and it’s easy to tell the difference between those who are real books people and those who just like the idea of being a writer and are more engaged with the attention that comes their way than with the writing itself. To her credit, however, Beverley hates the divisive terms ‘literary fiction’ and ‘popular fiction’. Her books are squarely part of the latter, but she definitely considers herself to be part of the former.Starbird, K., Arif, A., & Wilson, T. (2019). Disinformation as collaborative work: Surfacing the participatory nature of strategic information operations. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), article 127. When defined as a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal, studies in the UK estimate that between six and eight percent of the public inhabit politically partisan online news echo chambers.