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.
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.
The next paper in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is presented by Felix Münch and Ben Thies, and Cornelius Puschmann and I have also made a small contribution to it. Our project adapted an experimental algorithm to sample a language-based Twitter follower network, and this was necessary because gathering Twitter follower networks at scale has become increasingly difficult.
Information on such follower networks would open up significant new avenues for investigation that cannot be answered by examining actual interactions (via @mentions and retweets) alone. We did some such work in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre by mapping follower …
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.
Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.
But let’s begin with a reminder that my book 
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 …
