The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Jaron Harambam, whose focus is on the personalisation of news content to individual readers and the implications that this may have for the news that users encounter. This may help readers navigate a vast and complex information landscape, and enable news outlets to provide not only popular but also relevant niche stories to the relevant audiences.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mariella Bastian, who points out the impact of the digital turn in journalistic conflict coverage; journalists themselves are now more mobile, but citizen content has also become easier to incorporate into the coverage. Further, digital media also intensify the dissemination of content coverage, and this could both increase or decrease hostility between the conflict parties.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.