Keyword – personalization

Gálik, Mihály:

Echo chambers and filter bubbles

In the past three decades, both the production of news/information on public matters and the distribution of these to the audience have undergone major changes. The online distribution of news and information has enabled users to personalise their news consumption on the one hand, and allowed for user generated content on the other hand. These two practices have become the recurring topics of mainstream communication research after the millennium. Around the early 2010s and in the Web 2.0 environment, the role of algorithmic filtering introduced by online news platform providers has become another mainstream research topic. Leading academics have also voiced the paradox that the personalisation of online news consumption may reduce the scope and diversity of news consumed by the audiences, the abundance of available news on many online platforms notwithstanding. Yet the findings of most relevant research projects suggest that this concern is highly overstated. Although there are echo chambers and filter bubbles in the contemporary digital networked media scene, these are highly different from the ones outlined by their visionaries.

Keywords: algorithmic filtering, echo chamber, filter bubble, hype, news bubble, news media, online news media, personalization