Scholarly networks create echo chambers that sideline marginal knowledge

Evidence

The book aims to shift the current discourse on microcelebrity studies, encouraging scholars to interrogate our citation politics, intellectual biases, personal attention ecologies, and the value of conducting microcelebrity research for public good. We consider some instances of public good as: returning to the community, generating new knowledge emically from the community, conducting translation work (language, literacies, lived experiences) for the wider academic community. We first need to acknowledge that all knowledge production is processual and political. This is especially important because the landscape of celebrity cultures is being shaped by physical and digital social networks, and reliance on such networks as their status quo often results in echo chambers of mutual amplification within in-groups, while perspectives from the margins and fringes, and alternative and subversive discourses are sidelined. — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe, 116

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theory of network effects and epistemic closure in knowledge production; resonates with the trade-reputation literature about who is trusted within closed communities. — connects to: Early founders of online fame research helped create a confusing field — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 87; Bridging echo chambers fails without cross-partisan trust — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 62; Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Anglo-American academics resist studying the 1,200-member Mont Pèlerin network as collective thought #exemplifies (0.88) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 17
• Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants #expands (0.85)
• Scientific communities are prestige struggles over attention #expands (0.82) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 13
• Patronage networks make scholarly critique too costly in Middle East studies #exemplifies (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 329
• Echo chambers are porous to networking yet resist dissonant voices. #expands (0.80) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 46
• Learned fields constrain individual scholarship through cumulative institutional consensus #corroborates (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 506
• Groups systematically discuss shared knowledge while undervaluing their most distinctive information #exemplifies (0.75)