The Echo Chamber: John Boyne

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Terms like echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation are widely used in public and political debate but not in ways that are always aligned with, or based on, scientific work. And even among academic researchers, there is not always a clear consensus on exact definitions of these concepts.

Thorson, K. (2020). Attracting the news: Algorithms, platforms, and reframing incidental exposure. Journalism, 21(8), 1067–1082. These effects are not equally strong for everyone. Passive personalisation based on past behaviour may well make algorithms more likely to recommend more news to those who already engage with a lot of news (Thorson 2020), but they are particularly important – and arguably more beneficial – for those least likely to actively seek out a lot of news on their own, such as younger people and those with lower interest in news (Fletcher and Nielsen 2018a; Wojcieszak et al. 2021).Commentators and analysts typically worry about echo chambers and filter bubbles because they fear they will fuel polarisation, diminish mutual understanding, and ultimately lead to a situation where people are so far apart that they have no common ground – effectively inhabiting different realities. Polarisation can take substantially different forms. The most important forms for the purposes of this review are the following. First, ideological polarisation, which refers to the degree to which people disagree about political issues. Second, affective polarisation, which refers to people’s feelings about the ‘other side’ – those they disagree with on a given issue. Third, news audience polarisation, which refers to the degree to which audiences for news outlets in a given country are generally more politically partisan or politically mixed. Kim and Lu 2020; Trilling and Schoenbach 2015). As Weeks et al. (2016, p. 263) write of the US context, “although partisans exhibit some preference for like- minded sources, we find no evidence that they avoid disagreeable information but rather continue to rely mostly on a common set of mainstream, general interest news outlets. These more mainstream sources provide information that at times challenges both Republicans’ and Democrats’ positions, yet neither make an attempt to avoid them.” West, J. D., & Bergstrom, C. T. (2021). Misinformation in and about science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(15), e1912444117. This work provides a set of basic findings about the dynamics of contemporary news media use, the relative importance of algorithmic ranking versus self-selection in shaping it, and how engagement with some forms of information can further strengthen already strongly held beliefs.

Powered by John Boyne's characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. In this Q&A with him, the bestselling author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas spoke to The Penguin Post about his favourite book this year, cancel culture and his advice for finding your voice as a writer. The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a ‘national treasure’ (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Some of this research has compared differences between groups that form around science versus conspiracy news (Del Vicario et al. 2016a; Del Vicario et al. 2016b), whereas other research has focused on specific topics like vaccines (Cinelli et al. 2021; Cossard et al. 2020; Dunn et al. 2015; Schmidt et al. 2018), abortion (Cinelli et al. 2021), climate change (Williams et al. 2015), and most recently COVID-19 (Wang and Qian 2021). Scheufele, D. A., & Krause, N. M. (2019). Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(16), 7662.Social scientists use the term echo chamber to describe a particular situation some people are in as a result of media supply, distribution, and/or their own demand – namely one where they occupy what Jamieson and Capella in their influential book Echo Chamber defined as “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal” (2008, p. 76). The magnification part is typically taken to be a preponderance of attitude-consistent information (e.g., people on the left seeking out information that reinforces their pre-existing views) and the insulation part about the absence of cross-cutting exposure (e.g., people on the right not coming across centrist or left- wing perspectives that challenge their pre-existing views). In public and policy debate the term echo chamber is sometimes used interchangeably with the term filter bubble, but it is important to distinguish between the two.

There are a number of areas where our review suggests that there is a clear majority view in academic research, including most notably: Self-selection, both along partisan lines and, importantly, in terms of levels of interest, plays a significant role in shaping news and media use. From the author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies and powered with Boyne’s characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. Brulle, R.J., Carmichael, J., & Jenkins, J. C. (2012). Shifting public opinion on climate change: An empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the U.S., 2002–2010. Climatic Change, 114(2), 169–188.There are plenty of genre authors who have done a much better job of examining the nuances around social media, capturing both the absurdity and the dark, real-world consequences of public intrusion into private grief. It’s the concept of “failing” that feels so poignant. His experiences at school, combined with the fact that homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until Boyne was in his third year of university and that, by that time, the Aids crisis was in full spate, feel like so much to contend with that self-reproach is simply too cruel. In other parts of his life, after all, Boyne seems like a measure of success: not only in career terms, but in his closeness to family and friends and in his enjoyment of his daily life. “I’m not spending all my day crying about it,” he reassures me. “I work hard. And I like my life a lot. And maybe you just can’t have everything.” Dubois, E., & Blank, G. (2018). The echo chamber is overstated: The moderating effect of political interest and diverse media. Information, Communication & Society, 21(5), 729–745. Castro-Herrero, L., Nir, L., & Skovsgaard, M. (2018). Bridging gaps in cross-cutting media exposure: The role of public service broadcasting. Political Communication, 35(4), 542–565. Garrett, R. K. (2009). Politically motivated reinforcement seeking: Reframing the selective exposure debate. Journal of Communication, 59(4), 676–699.

Stuffed with stories, literary references and peculiar details, a history of troubled objects, this beguiling novel is a work of astonishing synthesis. Ultimately, it is an account of Evie's struggle to find her place in the post-colonial world, and thus assume an identity, an ideological position, of her own. She is all too aware, as Bruno Schulz noted, that "what is put in words is already halfway under control". Which may also explain why she believes, "There are no words that can describe the vibrancy of my audition." Maybe not, but by the time you finish this rich and resonant book, your ears are sure to be twitching. Each family member has their own storyline, but the key one is an offensive tweet sent by George. It’s never quite clear whether George was thoughtless or deliberately set out to offend (although there was a conversation shortly before said tweet which leads the reader to infer he knew what he was doing). Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the relationship between news and media use and various forms of polarisation has to be understood in the context of increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments where most people spend a limited amount of time with news and many internet users do not regularly actively seek out online news, leading to significant inequalities in news use.Wang, D., & Qian, Y. (2021). Echo chamber effect in rumor rebuttal discussions about COVID-19 in China: Social media content and network analysis study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(3), e27009. In Europe, public service media often help bridge these gaps, with differences between those with low interest and high interest being smaller in countries like the UK that have widely used public service media (Castro-Herrero et al. 2018). But many people self-select away from politics and news, choosing entertainment content instead (Prior 2005), and people with more limited levels of formal education and lower levels of income generally use less news than more privileged parts of the population (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen 2018). This is a reminder that, while of great interest to politicians and political scientists, politics is not the only, or even main determinant of news and media use. Media use is often more shaped by habits that in turn reflect a mix of instrumental uses and preferences anchored in social contexts that often exhibit more significant homophily in terms of social class than in terms of politics (Bos et al. 2016; Dahlgren 2019; Dubois and Blank 2018; Garrett et al. 2013; Johnson et al. 2011; Skovsgaard et al. 2016; Van Aelst et al. 2017; Yang et al. 2020).