Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real?
Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?
Neil Selwyn, Should Robots Replace Teachers?
Neil Selwyn, Is Technology Good for Education?
polity
Copyright © Axel Bruns 2019
The right of Axel Bruns to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3646-7
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This book emerged as an unexpected companion to my 2018 monograph Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. As I wrote that book, 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 Association of Internet Researchers, International Communication Association, Social Media & Society, and Future of Journalism conferences, I know that many of my colleagues feel the same.
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.
My sincere thanks to the many colleagues with whom I’ve discussed the themes of this book – in particular, my colleagues in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. Many thanks also to Mary Savigar at Polity for a number of stimulating discussions about the shape of the book. My research was supported by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere, Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis: Emerging Forms, Practices and Uses, and LIEF project TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media in Australia.