The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is my colleague Kim Osman, presenting outcomes from our research project in collaboration with The Conversation and the Cooperative Research Centres Association in Australia. We are interested in assessments of the public value and impact of scholarly work, which are also increasingly demanded by the governments that fund scholarly research. Slides here:

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:

1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?

The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean everything and nothing. For example, what does it mean to be inside an filter bubble or echo chamber? Do you need to be completely cut off from the world around you, which seems to be what those metaphors suggest? Only in such extreme cases – which are perhaps similar to being in a cult that has completely disconnected from the rest of society – can the severe negative effects that the supporters of the echo chamber or filter bubble theories imagine actually become reality, because they assume that people in echo chambers or filter bubbles no longer see any content that disagrees with their political worldviews.

Now, such complete disconnection is not entirely impossible, but very difficult to achieve and maintain. And most of the empirical evidence we have points in the opposite direction. In particular, the immense success of extremist political propaganda (including ‘fake news’, another very problematic and poorly defined term) in the US, the UK, parts of Europe, and even in Brazil itself in recent years provides a very strong argument against echo chambers and filter bubbles: if we were all locked away in our own bubbles, disconnected from each other, then such content could not have travelled as far, and could not have affected as many people, as quickly as it appears to have done. Illiberal governments wouldn’t invest significant resources in outfits like the Russian ‘Internet Research Agency’ troll farm if their influence operations were confined to existing ideological bubbles; propaganda depends crucially on the absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles if it seeks to influence more people than those who are already part of a narrow group of hyperpartisans.

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 next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Changfeng Chen and Wen Shi, whose focus is on the ethical dimensions of AI-driven ‘fake news’ detection – as part of many ethical issues related to artificial intelligence more generally.

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 next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Catherine Young, whose focus is the rise of of journalism metrics – audience engagement can not be measured considerably more closely by news outlets, and this influences editorial decision-making as well. Catherine looks at this in the context of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s mobile news services; ABC News provides a Facebook Messenger service, as well as pushing short news updates to services like Apple News and its own mobile app.