Third, given the ease of accessing news online and the abundant supply, differences in individuals’ active choices and regular habits play a defining role in the overall distribution of news use, tending towards greater inequalities, with a large minority of news lovers, about 22% of UK internet users, engaging with many different news sources on a regular basis across many different offline and online platforms, a majority of daily briefers (55%) who use a few different sources of news and a large minority of more casual users (23%) who often do not access news daily. Differences in news use are partially aligned with differences in age, gender, education, and income, both in general (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen 2018) and around, for example, coronavirus information (Fletcher et al. 2020b). The keen of ear as well as the keen-eyed are not wanted these days," declares the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's brilliant novel The Lime Works, while struggling in vain to begin his great work on hearing. It's a sentiment shared by fiftysomething Evie Steppman, the governing voice of Luke Williams's first novel, as she sits at a desk made from a wardrobe door and copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and tries to compile an auditory history of her life. Her ears, "graced with heavy lobes", had been pretty keen in their day, after all. Nelson, J. L., & Webster, J. G. (2017). The myth of partisan selective exposure: A portrait of the online political news audience. Social Media + Society, 3(3). McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415–444. I enjoyed writing the character of Beverley Cleverley, the romantic novelist who hires a ghost-writer to write her books for her. Beverley has little or no interest in literature but takes herself incredibly seriously. Over more than twenty years of publishing novels, I’ve met so many different writers at literary festivals and it’s easy to tell the difference between those who are real books people and those who just like the idea of being a writer and are more engaged with the attention that comes their way than with the writing itself. To her credit, however, Beverley hates the divisive terms ‘literary fiction’ and ‘popular fiction’. Her books are squarely part of the latter, but she definitely considers herself to be part of the former.

Kaiser, J., & Rauchfleisch, A. (2020). Birds of a feather get recommended together: Algorithmic homophily in YouTube’s channel recommendations in the United States and Germany. Social Media + Society, 6(4).

Book of the Month

In the literature review we aim to summarise relevant empirical research and clarify the meaning of terms that are used both in public and policy debate and in more specialised scientific research, and not always in the same way. Terms like “echo chamber” and “filter bubble” have exploded into public discourse in recent years and the Hansard official record shows how these terms are increasingly used by elected officials in UK Parliamentary debates. Needless to say, public and political use of these terms are not 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. 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. 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). 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). Martin, G. J., & McCrain, J. (2019). Local news and national politics. American Political Science Review, 113(2), 372–384.

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. Green, J., Edgerton, J., Naftel, D., Shoub, K. & Cranmer, S. J. (2020). Elusive consensus: Polarization in elite communication on the COVID-19 pandemic. Science Advances, eabc2717. Fletcher, R., Robertson, C. T., & Nielsen, R. K. (2021b). How many people live in politically partisan online news echo chambers in different countries? Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 1. Trilling, D., van Klingeren, M., & Tsfati, Y. (2017). Selective exposure, political polarization, and possible mediators: Evidence from the Netherlands. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 29(2), 189–213. 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).Whether echo chambers and the like work broadly in the same ways around science issues as around more conventionally political issues. DellaVigna, S., & Kaplan, E. (2007). The Fox News effect: Media bias and voting. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 1187–1234. 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. This means, for example, that while those with highly partisan political views are significantly more likely to use partisan news media with a similar orientation, they are not necessarily less likely to use other news media with a different orientation. PP. There are a lot of contemporary issues that you cover in the book – addiction, gender identification, ‘woke’ culture – is there one thing, in particular, which you hope your readers will take away from the book?

Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The ambivalent internet: Mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. Cambridge, and Malden, MA: Polity Press. In summary, the work reviewed here suggests echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, finds no support for the filter bubble hypothesis and offers a very mixed picture on polarisation and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarisation. Introduction ↑ There are a number of areas where our review suggests that there is a clear majority view in academic research, including most notably: Gidron, N., Adams, J., & Horne, W. (2019). Toward a comparative research agenda on affective polarization in mass publics. APSA Comparative Politics Newsletter, 29, 30–36.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.