The Echo Chamber: John Boyne

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Attending McClean’s trial prompted Boyne to give his testimony to the Garda; he can’t say much more about it at the moment, because it is still in their hands. But what was especially striking was the way that Boyne wrote about it, going beyond the horrific nature of the abuse itself to meditate on the effects it has had on his emotional, romantic and sexual life. Recalling relationships that didn’t work and the breakup of his marriage, which he describes to me as the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, he wrote: “The truth is, I’ve failed in every romantic relationship I’ve ever pursued.” In the conversation we have, he talks candidly about how the loss of his husband, with whom he had been in a relationship for 11 years, has “left a scar within me that will never heal”, not least because it was entirely unexpected to him; and about how much he longs for a loving partner to share the life he’s made.

In addition to people’s common use of relatively impartial public service broadcasting undercutting the existence of partisan echo chambers, we should keep in mind that – at least online – their potential size is limited by the fact that many people do not consume much online news in the first place. In the UK, around 25% of internet users say they access no online news at all each week (Newman et al. 2021). 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). That said, there are growing concerns about selective exposure in scientific domains that have become politically aligned, emotionally loaded, and more explicitly and actively politically polarised in some countries (e.g., Nisbet et al. 2015). 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. We seek to identify (a) areas where we believe there is a clear majority view in academic research, (b) areas where there are some empirical studies but not necessarily convergent interpretations, and (c) areas where there is at this point little evidence to help us understand a situation that is rapidly evolving in terms of both media structure and media substance (as the constant evolution of the digital media environment as well as communications around the coronavirus pandemic has shown).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. What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds – and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept. 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). 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).

Analogous arguments have been made in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, where research in the US has shown polarisation in elite communication about the issue, with Democrats emphasising threats to public health and American workers, and Republicans placing greater emphasis on China and businesses early on in the pandemic (Green et al. 2020; see also Hart et al. 2020). Hamilton and Safford (2021) used survey data to show that trust in science agencies like the CDC declined rapidly among Republicans in the US but not Democrats, following Donald Trump’s changing views toward the CDC, views that were in turn amplified by conservative media including Fox News. This further underlines how top-down cues from political elites, including most prominently the President, were crucial to the deep partisan divide that formed around the subject. We discuss online echo chambers in the context of a set of related concerns around the possible links between the rise of the internet and various digital platforms (search engines, social media, messaging applications, news aggregators, etc.) and polarisation in our societies. The tweet sets off a whirlwind of offence and has a series of consequences. This combines with the various dramas of the other family members to bring the story to its climax. Boxell, L., Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. (2020). Cross-country trends in affective polarization. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.Social scientists examine a range of different kinds of polarisation of the public, including ideological polarisation, affective polarisation, and news audience polarisation. As with any attempt to measure a change over time, decisions about what time frame to consider will influence conclusions, and often, there is little consistent data allowing for rigorous longitudinal analysis. Even in the United States, researchers have long found that echo chambers are smaller and less prevalent than commonly assumed. Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011, p. 1831) observe that “internet news consumers with homogeneous news diets are rare,” and Garrett (2013, p. 248) similarly argues that the notion that large numbers of people are cocooned in pure ideological news echo chambers, cut off from other points of view, is exaggerated and wrong.