Also, if I’m seeing this correctly, it only recognises ASCII “words” (a–z, A–Z, 0–9, _), so it’s not even accurate and will over-count words with accents, umlauts, etc.
IMO, here’s a lot of room for improvement for German, because it’s a real dice roll whether a compound noun will be recognised or not. You can try swiping the components individually, but then you have to go deleting spaces everywhere. Unless there’s a feature I’m missing?
This is the sort of thing I think someone would have found a better solution for if more languages (and possibly English in particular) had non-spaced compound nouns.
Looking at the links in the Wikipedia article I discovered this wonderfully “old web”-style page with various envelope folding guides[1]. I found it so endearing that I sat down and tried a few of them out, which was great fun.
I’ve tried out Apple’s Look Around recently and was impressed with the transition animation compared to Google Maps. If you have an Apple device, try it out in London for instance: Moving past a red telephone box shows how the object kind of retains its shape during the transition. Traffic moving around you also looks quite different compared to Google.
The problem with scientific terminology is widely recognised in communication science. The issue is that while terms used by disciplines such as physics, law or medicine are sufficiently esoteric that someone “on the outside” wouldn’t use their terms casually, so they are somewhat protected from “watering down” their concepts in public discourse—or not, as we are seeing with anti-vax ideology, for instance. Terms in communication science also carry specific meaning to those who know them, but can just as well be interpreted as everyday language by outsiders.
I also get what you mean by “straw-man-y”. I think the issue is that definitions have to be robust and hypotheses falsifiable in order to make them researchable, so they must be kind of stringent. Exactly as you say, someone might be in a political echo chamber, but that is not their entire life. They have peers, family, friends, colleagues that also expose them to political information. By focusing so much on the online, the echo chamber assumption was very limited from the start.
You raise some points that were also raised by a sibling commenter, but I’ll try to reply to them. You are correct that FB and EC are different concepts that are unfortunately often used interchangeably (even in research). This stems from the fact that there was no robust definition offered when the concept was introduced. Bruns offers a definition to distinguish the concepts.
> The former is passive, and you have no choice. The latter is human nature. Birds of a feather and such.
Both concepts are closely related to the idea of homophily, the preference to connect or communicate with like-minded individuals (birds of a feather, as you say). In Bruns’ definition, echo chambers mean the preference to connect, while filter bubbles mean the preference to communicate. Both of them are, as you say, human nature at their core. The concepts go further than homophily, though, in that they also exclude individuals or information outside of the chamber or bubble.
> "Appear to encounter" is a vague.
This is from the research abstract summarising recent empirical findings. I think some critical distance is warranted.
> Thst aside, encounter doesn't mean you're open to those ideas. (…) The exposure doesn't open their mind, it backfires and pulls the blinders even more narrow. I missed where this study addresses that boomerang effect.
This effect is addressed as a “oppositional reading stance” in the section “Social and Political Relevance and Impact”.
> Again, "exposure" isn't necessarily leading to more diverse ideas.
You are correct. However, if individuals are encountering information contrary to their bubble’s or chamber’s belief, we would have to conclude that there is no FB or EC at work as it has failed to exclude this information. If the bubble or chamber was as robust as claimed by Pariser and others, this content would not have reached the individual.
> From multiple sources I've read that limited ownership is leading to consolidation.
You are referring to ownership structures. “Fragmentation of national mediaspheres” here refers to the audience, specifically the concern that the increasing number of media offers, especially with the advent of the internet, would fragment the national audience and have adverse effects on discourse and democracy.
> That might be true, but it's not proof that FB or EC don't exist.
It is not epistemologically possible to prove that these effects do not exist. There is limited evidence that they exist in specific contexts, but barely any evidence for a population-wide effect.
You raise very valid points. The case you describe would be characterised as “oppositional reading” of mainstream media by those believing in a conspiracy.
However, this is unrelated to the common understanding echo chambers. A big problem with the concept is that there is no robust definition, and the fact that it is used widely in mainstream discussion does not make it easier. The tendency to preferentially connect or communicate with like-minded people (homophily) is nothing new, we encounter it everywhere—think hobby groups, special-interest forums like HN etc. Social media’s affordances especially promote homophily. What the filter bubble/echo chamber concepts add to this preference is an exclusion of outsiders. The above commenter summarised a purported consequence as “you’re sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views”. In this sense, using diverse news would be incompatible with an echo chamber.
What is especially interesting, then, is that ideological polarisation is very much alive on the internet, despite (or indeed because of) the absence of echo chambers.
I thoroughly recommend the article I linked above. It touches upon these concepts and cites current research that allows you to dig deeper.
This echo chamber concept is cited time and time again in mainstream discussions, so much so that communication researchers argue that it has created “its own discursive reality”[1]. In fact, there is very little empirical support for the filter bubble and echo chamber concepts as a population-wide phenomenon. Social media users have been found to encounter more diverse news than non-users. And even when we think about people holding extremist views, findings suggest them to be even more engaged with the mainstream news compared to other news users—after all, they are interested to know what “the enemy” might be up to.
If you’re interested, the article below gives a great overview on the origin of this concept and different disciplines’ view on the subject (it’s open-access as well).
I used Anki extensively a few years ago when studying a new language at uni and it helped me a lot, but I just installed it again and not much has changed. It was clunky then and its flaws are showing even more now. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but even something as simple as loading an image from a URL, even though it uses a webview for the cards anyway, simply doesn’t work. Why not take advantage of the web technologies it’s using?
Also, the web client is very bare-bones, unfortunately.
There’s a classic theory in communication science by the German researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called the “spiral of silence”[1]. It basically says that people have an idea of the general public opinion on a topic, and in case their own opinion differs too much, they will stay silent in order not to be excluded from the group. This was classically seen with the negative result that the publicly acceptable opinion may not be the same as the majority opinion, as more and more people stay silent in a kind of spiral.
What we’re seeing today in online spaces is the possibility of people connecting online, forming their own bubbles of people with their own spirals – it has become much easier to sidestep the “general” spiral of silence.
The author's point about "dumb" ligatures doesn't really hold up: While the "fi" ligature will always mean "f followed by i" its use is not always correct.
For example, in German compound nouns, you do not set a ligature between the two nouns. For instance, "Kaufläche" (Kau: chewing, + Fläche: area) should be written with ligature, while in "Kaufleute" (Kauf: purchase, + Leute: people, = merchants) the ligature should be avoided.