The Echo Chamber: John Boyne

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But, importantly, many people do not have particularly strongly held political views and do not primarily approach news and media through a political lens (Bos et al. 2016; Yang et al. 2020). Often, basic interest, in turn partly aligned with levels of education and income, is a more important factor. Webster, J. G., & Ksiazek, T. B. (2012). The dynamics of audience fragmentation: Public attention in an age of digital media. Journal of Communication, 62(1), 39–56. Hobolt, S. B., Leeper, T. J., & Tilley, J. (2021). Divided by the vote: Affective polarization in the wake of the Brexit referendum. British Journal of Political Science, 51(4), 1476–1493. Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2018b). Automated serendipity: The effect of using search engines on news repertoire balance and diversity. Digital Journalism, 6(8), 976–989. The difference between the two terms is important. 2 An echo chamber is a form of bubble, but the term does not prejudge why some people might live in such bubbles – it is possible, for example, that some actively chose to, that the situation is a result of demand more than distribution or supply. A filter bubble, on the other hand, is an echo chamber primarily produced by ranking algorithms engaged in passive personalisation without any active choice on our part, a possible outcome of specific aspects of how news and information is distributed online.

There is much less work from outside the United States and no clear overall set of convergent findings. Experimental work from the Netherlands, for example, has found that while people might have a tendency to engage in selective exposure, this does not necessarily polarise people's attitudes (Trilling et al. 2017). Yet Wojcieszak et al. (2018), analysing panel survey data in the Netherlands, found that people with strong opinions about the EU polarised in their views after being exposed to news about the EU. 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. Dalton, R. J. (2006). Social modernization and the end of ideology debate: Patterns of ideological polarization. Japanese Journal of Political Science, 7(1), 1–22. Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2021a). More diverse, more politically varied: How social media, search engines and aggregators shape news repertoires in the United Kingdom. New Media & Society, July.

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Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

JB. These things are generally a mystery. I read voraciously and I write every day and I think when your mind is constantly engaged with fiction, you become better at producing it. I’m an observant person, I think, and stories present themselves to me regularly just in the act of living my life. I keep notebooks filled with ideas, most of which will never come to anything, but there’ll always be one that grows more and more interesting to me and that will become the basis of a novel. Bennett, W. L., Lawrence, R. G., & Livingston, S. (2007). When the press fails: Political power and the news media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path. Hamilton, L. C., & Safford, T. G. (2021). Elite cues and the rapid decline in trust in science agencies on COVID-19. Sociological Perspectives, 07311214211022391. Adams, J., Green, J., & Milazzo, C. (2012b). Who moves? Elite and mass-level depolarization in Britain, 1987–2001. Electoral Studies, 31(4), 643–655.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). Martin, G. J., & McCrain, J. (2019). Local news and national politics. American Political Science Review, 113(2), 372–384. Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), 405–431. 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.

There are a number of areas where our review suggests that there is a clear majority view in academic research, including most notably:

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Guess, A. M., Nyhan, B., Lyons, B., & Reifler, J. (2018). Avoiding the echo chamber about echo chambers: Why selective exposure to like-minded political news is less prevalent than you think. Miami, FL: Knight Foundation. Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The ambivalent internet: Mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. Cambridge, and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Affective polarisation refers to how much opposing partisans dislike one another. Most research on affective polarisation has been conducted in the United States and, in contrast to ideological polarisation, affective polarisation clearly seems to be on the rise – as one team of researchers find that ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party (Iyengar et al. 2019; see also Mason 2013). In the UK, there is evidence that affective polarisation exists between Labour and Conservative voters and also around opinion-based groups that either support or oppose Brexit (Hobolt et al. 2021). Comparative work on affective polarisation is in its infancy, but a few studies have been published recently. They find that levels of affective polarisation vary greatly by country (complicating the notion that polarisation is pronounced everywhere) and document considerable variation in patterns over time (belying the notion that a single universal cause – for example the spread of the internet – is driving polarisation everywhere) (Gidron et al. 2019; Boxell et al. 2020; Reiljan 2020). In several of these studies, Britain is found to have higher levels of affective polarisation than multiparty political systems in other parts of Northern and Western Europe, though one of these studies actually suggests affective polarisation in the UK may have declined since the 1980s (Boxell et al. 2020). Self-selection, both along partisan lines and, importantly, in terms of levels of interest, plays a significant role in shaping news and media use. Painter, J., & Ashe, T. (2012). Cross-national comparison of the presence of climate scepticism in the print media in six countries, 2007–10. Environmental Research Letters, 7(4), 044005.

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.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).