Within the next month or two, Polity Press will publish my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which critically evaluates the ‘filter bubble’ as well as ‘echo chamber’ concepts that have been blamed for much of the current communicative and political dysfunction around the world. The book takes a sceptical view, and shows how these ill-conceived metaphors are actively distracting us from more important questions that are related not to the role of search engines and social media platforms and their algorithms in channelling our information and communication streams, but to the fundamental drivers of a growing societal and …
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.
A quick update from on the road: I’m currently in Germany, where I’ve participated in the kick-off meeting for a new EU-funded project on social media analytics in society and crisis communication that is led by Stefan Stieglitz from the University of Duisburg-Essen – more on this as the project develops, no doubt.
But before that meeting I also had the opportunity to participate in a press briefing organised by the Science Media Center in Germany, which makes scholarly research more visible to journalists: this was to discuss the likelihood of disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to the European Union …
