Social Media

Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of journalism’s transformation in the wake of sociotechnological transformations resulting from the rise of blogs, citizen journalism, and contemporary social media to the present day.

The focus here is especially on the way that gatewatching and newssharing practices on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have changed audience activities around both breaking news stories and habitual news engagement, on the attempts by the journalism industry and by individual newsworkers to address and accommodate such changes, and on the implications this has for democracy and the public sphere as such.

Are Filter Bubbles Real?

My second new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, is something of an unexpected companion piece to Gatewatching and News Curation, and was published by Polity Books in 2019; it’s also available from Amazon, of course. As I wrote Gatewatching and News Curation, it became increasingly clear how much we are hampered, misled, and distracted from more important questions by the metaphors of echo chambers and filter bubbles that are no longer fit for purpose, and probably never were. From my conversations at the many conferences, I know that many of my colleagues feel the same.

In the book, I offer a critical evaluation of the evidence for and against echo chambers and filter bubbles. If, like me, you’re fed up with these vague concepts, based on little more evidence than hunches and anecdotes, this book is for you; if you think that there’s still some value in using them, I hope I am at least able to introduce some more specific definitions and empirical rigour into the debate. In either case, perhaps I will convince you that the debate about these information cocoons distracts us from more critical questions at present.

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

The next presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jeremy Shtern, who begins by noting that the quantification of the influence of online and social media actors is a tricky problem – but it may not be as hard to qualify such influence. It is important in this context to understand online environments as working largely on the basis of a monetisation philosophy, too.

The next presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Elinor Carmi, whose interest is in the power behind spam, noise, and other disruptive behaviours. In most forms of creative media, there is a form of direction, often aimed at generating an emotive response from the audience. This is also true in online spaces, where we are directed by algorithmic rhythms. We might be able to understand these by borrowing concepts from sound.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.

The third speaker in this IAMCR2019 session is Zhieh Lor, whose focus is on coping strategies for dealing with news overload in social media. Such cognitive overload is becoming a problem because of the considerable increase in news dissemination and sharing through a complex multitude of channels. How do users manage this?

The final IAMCR 2019 panel I’m attending today is on ‘fake news’ and hate speech, and we start with Andrew Duffy. His focus is on why people share ‘fake news’ stories via social media.

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.