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Brønholt here introduces the concept of gated communities of the digitised mind. These draw on the notions of echo chambers and filter bubbles to suggest that there are regions for at least some of us that function in the same way as a gated community in which we only mix with those least likely to challenge our views. He supports this argument with original analysis of 15 Danish politicians which summarises the results from semi-structured interviews with the respondents, and an analysis of their personal social media (Facebook and Twitter) feeds, as well as identical Google Searches on their private devices.

In this chapter, C. Thi Nguyen argues that Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure.

In this chapter, the focus is on the phenomenon of online echo chambers, trying an evaluation from the broad perspective of cultural evolution. It has been noted that individuals associate on social media in communities of like-minded people, where they are repeatedly exposed to the same kind of information and, even more importantly, they are not exposed to contrary information. How strong are echo chambers? What are their effects on the flow of online information? Although the formation and existence of echo chambers is consistent with the cognitive and evolutionary approach defended here, individuals are exposed online to a considerable amount of contrary opinions: in fact, against current common sense, to more diverse opinions than what happens in their offline life. As a consequence, the increase of polarization, which many link to a more informationally segregated society, could also have been overestimated, or, in any case, may be due to motifs other than our social media activity.

Concern over filter bubbles, echo chambers, and misinformation on the Internet are not new. However, as noted by Howard and Bradshaw (Chapter 12), events around the 2016 US presidential election and the UK’s Brexit referendum brought these concerns up again to near-panic levels, raising questions about the political implications of the algorithms that drive search engines and social media. To address these issues, the authors conducted an extensive survey of Internet users in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the US, asking respondents how they use search, social media, and other media for getting information about politics, and what difference these media have made for them. Their findings demonstrate that search is one among many media gateways and outlets deployed by those interested in politics, and that Internet users with an interest in politics and search skills are unlikely to be trapped in a filter bubble, or cocooned in a political echo chamber.

This chapter opens with Harry's “I know you all” soliloquy in Henry V. It shows that the drama of his transactions with himself, with Falstaff, with his father, and with the rest of the world unfolds coherently from the second scene in 1 Henry IV through the tetralogy. It argues that because Henry V unfolds in a kind of tetralogical echo chamber, it suffers when it is performed as an independent play rather than as the last in a series. The continuity of the sequence adds richness and specificity to the protagonist's motivation. Should this continuity get bracketed out in the interest of theatrical self-sufficiency, those involved in the production and performance of Henry V would have to pretend that factors intrinsic to its motivational drama either do not exist or are relatively trivial. Respect for the play's relative self-sufficiency has to share the stage with attention to the textual affiliations that bind it to the other plays. The chapter then follows some of those affiliations back through the Henriad, beginning with the echo-chamber effect in passages from act 1, scenes 1 and 2 of Henry V.

In Western democracies, most social media users are not part of political echo chambers but encounter a mix of views they agree and disagree with. It is mostly users who are heavily involved in politics and frequently discuss it online who predominantly see content that supports their views. Conversely, accidental exposure to political news on social media is widespread and reaches beyond the types of citizens who are typically more involved in politics. Substantial numbers of social media users are also targeted by electoral mobilization, and these users tend to be more politically involved than average. Different groups of users have distinctive types of political experiences on social media, and there are stark differences between the United States and other countries: American social media users are more likely to be exposed to politically supportive content, to accidentally encounter news, and to be targeted by electoral mobilization on social media.

The final necessary element of democratic space is flexibility. Flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habit required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. Using the work of John Dewey, this chapter explains how flexible spaces provide an environment in which citizens can develop the experimental habits required for a progressive democratic politics. In flexible spaces—spaces characterized by both variety and malleability—citizens will not only encounter difference but will also be able to use it in the process of democratic decision-making. The chapter then turns to the case of Reddit as an example of a digital democratic space. It also shows the effects of flexible spaces by comparing two subreddits: r/the_donald and r/TwoXChromosomes. The chapter concludes by suggesting how the spaces of Reddit could be redesigned to be more flexible, further facilitating the democratic practice of experimentalism.

This chapter focuses on the future of friendship, arguing that there is no reason to believe that the future of friendship will be fundamentally different from how friendship has been in the past. Despite cross-cultural differences, Dunbar’s Number remains constant and people with different friendship styles enjoy roughly the same health and emotional benefits from their friendships. Barring drastic change, it is likely that the future of friendship is not going to be markedly different from the past and the present of friendship. On closer examination, the sorts of things that are commonly viewed as threats to friendship — like social media and echo chambers — turn out to be less ominous. Time constraints, established social norms, and personal and cultural preferences are likely to apply brakes to the speed at which friendship transforms over time.

This chapter presents an overview of the role of communications in governance indicators and discusses challenges to understanding whether, how, and why their intended audiences use or fail to use rankings, indices, and related data. These include long-standing challenges associated with ensuring that information meets the needs of different target audiences, engaging with traditional media, and using rankings to present indicators. As new technologies have changed information flows and dynamics, new challenges have emerged, including echo chambers and data graveyards. The chapter shows a broken feedback loop between governance indicator creators and their intended users that can be traced to the understanding of communications as an accessory activity, without integrating user research and frank self-assessments into the indicator creation cycle. More research should be conducted about the extent to which the current offer of indicators is meeting users’ needs and the extent to which underlying theories of change remain valid.

Science doubt, resistance, and denial have been amplified in the digital society. There is a previously unimaginable range of information available, and most people can no longer imagine life otherwise. When one is curious about something, one turns to the internet. But how does one know what to believe and what is truthful? In Chapter 2, “How Do We Make Sense of Science Claims Online?,” the authors argue that most people are ill-equipped to engage in the critical reflection that would help them evaluate conflicting claims and biased information or to recognize agendas that may lead to distorted or one-sided presentations. The echo chamber of the internet raises additional concerns. As individuals seek out information, they often turn to familiar sources and the opinions of like-minded individuals. In an age of social media, they see Facebook postings and tweets of friends who share a worldview—and often drop the feeds of those who do not. The authors draw on their own research and that of others to describe these growing concerns and offer suggestions to inividuals, educators, communicators, and policy makers for improving critical evaluation of scientific information found online.

Chapter 4 uses the case of Upworthy.com to illuminate how persuasive political information now reaches citizens in entirely new ways. Upworthy is emblematic of a changing social media environment that supports and rewards new types of activist interventions in the public discourse. The chapter discusses Upworthy as a window into how analytics and the culture of testing interact with the new dynamics of public attention online. It provides the first detailed assessment of Upworthy’s development, organizational model, and impacts on news dissemination. It offers a rejoinder to common concerns about “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” that have become a fixture of the discourse about online politics for nearly 20 years. It also discusses how the rise of organizations like Upworthy alters the power and potential of persuasive activist communications.

Chapter 7 turns to user-generated content, social media, and ‘Web 2.0’ technologies in digital China’s message boards and comment sections. The cases of the Nanjing Massacre and the Diaoyu Islands then show that online commentaries often provide a nuanced picture of how to make sense of Sino-Japanese relations, and yet the overarching discursive patterns combine with digital mechanisms such as ‘likes’ and algorithmic popularity rankings to push the discussion into nationalist media scripts. In contrast, China’s microblogging spheres at first sight offer a different story: discussions on Weibo or Weixin are diverse, dynamic, and can have impressive reach. Yet the nature of such social networks ultimately either skews them in favour of a few influential users or moves discussions into the walled gardens of small social groups, making nationalist discourse reverberate through the echo chambers of digital China and contributing to a visceral sense of a shared nationhood.

In this chapter, Hanna Gunn and Michael Patrick Lynch examine the connection between epistemic agency and the internet. They identify two conditions that are true of responsible epistemic agency: first, responsible epistemic agents aim to develop epistemic virtues, merit, and capacities that help them to responsibly change their epistemic environment, as well as the capacities that enable them to recognize and respect these epistemic traits in others. Second, responsible epistemic agents treat other epistemic agents with a form of respect that demonstrates a willingness to learn from them. Gunn and Lynch then show that the ways in which the internet makes information more widely available can also undermine our ability to be responsible epistemic agents. For instance, the personalization of online spaces can unwittingly lead users into echo chambers and filter-bubbles and away from a diverse range of perspectives, and fake news and information pollution can make for a hostile online epistemic environment.

Chapter 7 explores one important obstacle to informal networked deliberation: polarization. If citizens exclude differently-minded people from their networks or refuse to deliberate with them on political matters, then informal networked deliberation cannot fulfil its full potential. Drawing extensively on empirical research, the chapter points out that citizens’ networks are heterogenous, and citizens do deliberate with differently-minded others. They may not completely change their minds in response, but in any case opinion change is not a good indicator for genuine deliberation and its reflective processes of internal deliberation. Finally, this chapter discusses how organized group deliberations can be used as ‘network interventions’ and valued instrumentally for what they can achieve at the community level. By selecting participants with the help of network mapping, organized deliberation can leverage the diffusion capacity of people’s social networks to scale up important deliberative effects across the entire community.

News consumption is moving online. If this move fundamentally changes how news is produced and consumed it will have important ramifications for politics. In this chapter the authors formulate a model of the supply and demand of news online that is motivated by descriptive features of online news consumption. The authors estimate the demand model using a combination of microdata and aggregate moments from a panel of Internet users. They evaluate the fit of the model to key features of the data and then use it to compute the predictions of the supply model. They also discuss how a model such as this can inform debates about the effects of the Internet on political polarization and other outcomes of interest.

This chapter reflects on the election of Donald Trump and the vote of the British electorate in favour of ‘Brexit’ from the European Union. While we refrain from judging the outcomes of these votes, we do discuss concerns pertaining to the lack of truthfulness in both campaigns. After rehearsing the lies on which the Trump and Brexit campaigns were based, we consider different explanations as to why these campaigns were nevertheless successful, and where this leaves the argument for epistemic democracy. Particularly worrisome are tendencies towards ‘epistemic insouciance’, ‘epistemic malevolence’, and ‘epistemic agnosticism’. We also consider the problematic influence of social media in terms of echo chambers and filter bubbles. The core argument in favour of epistemic democracy is that the pooling of votes by majority rule has epistemically beneficial properties, assuming certain conditions. If these assumptions are not met, or are systematically corrupted, then epistemic democracy is under threat.

Chapter 2 considers what happens at the sharp turn in the road when a narrative does not just lend meaning and organization to the group but isolates it from healthy public discourse; an adversarial turn that occurs when the group’s narrative becomes a closed and rigid ideology. The chapter outlines the telltale signs of the ideological transition and describes some key features that can be uncovered through narrative analysis. It goes on to discuss how the closedness of a narrative is closely related to the insularity of the group. Finally, text from climate skeptical blogs and op-eds are examined and the narrative approach to analyzing ideology is illustrated.