Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Publications

Snurb — Friday 7 July 2023 19:24

A Clutch of Presentations from ICA 2023

Politics | Government | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Publications | ICA 2023 |

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 22 December 2022 07:35

A Few More Updates before the End of the Year

Politics | Government | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly Contributions’ Impact on Public Debate (ARC Linkage) | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Global Journalism Innovation Lab (SSHRC) | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 24 April 2021 14:43

A Round-Up of New Publications

Politics | Produsers and Produsage | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Crisis Communication | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly Contributions’ Impact on Public Debate (ARC Linkage) | ARC Future Fellowship | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications | AoIR Flashpoint Symposium 2019 |

Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.

The first of these is a new book chapter led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Monday 26 August 2019 10:59

Some Questions about Filter Bubbles, Polarisation, and the APIcalypse

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

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 …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Wednesday 31 July 2019 09:01

Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: Debunking the Myths

Politics | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

(Crossposted from the Polity blog.)

Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.

But these metaphors are built on very …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 16 July 2019 13:30

A Round-Up of Some Recent Publications

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

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 …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Wednesday 10 July 2019 17:48

Debunking the ‘Filter Bubble’ and ‘Echo Chamber’ Myths

Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications | IAMCR 2019 |

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.

It's Not the Technology, Stupid: How the ‘Echo Chamber’ and ‘Filter Bubble’ Metaphors Have Failed Us from Axel Bruns

» continue reading...
Snurb — Monday 3 June 2019 13:54

Video Preview: Are Filter Bubbles Real?

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Publications |

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 …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 18 April 2019 05:26

Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, Gatewatching: Some Presentations on Recent and Upcoming Books

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

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 …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Monday 12 March 2018 09:25

New Book: Gatewatching and News Curation

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

I am delighted to formally announce the publication of my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. This is the culmination of a long period of intensive research – partially supported by funding from the Australian Research Council – that investigated the increasingly complex intersections between journalism and social media in the current media ecology. I’ve made the introductory chapter available on this site as a reading sample; it also provides an overview of the contents.

The book is designed as a sequel – not as a new edition – to my …

» continue reading...

Pagination

  • 1
  • Next page
Publications
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Destructive Polarization in Digital Communication Contexts: A Critical Review and Conceptual Framework (Information, Communication & Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.