Winston Churchill, second left, with former Prime Minister Lord Arthur Balfour. Sport and General/S&G Barratts/EMPICS Archive
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In April, I wrote about C Thi Nguyen’s distinction between ‘echo chambers’ and ‘epistemic bubbles’. Both are aspects of groupthink, but while epistemic bubbles stop people from encountering facts and arguments they might disagree with, echo chambers are about causing people to distrust alternative viewpoints (whether encountered or not).
Writing for CapX, the pollster Matt Singh adds a third concept – the “salience gap”.
This one is about what those claiming expertise in the field of communications call ‘cut through’. To make an impact, a message has first to be heard; then it has to be trusted; and, finally, it has to be thought both relevant and important –i.e. salient.
Singh calls this the salience gap because of the chasm between the preoccupations of a small group of politicians and political journalists and what the general public considers to be worth paying attention too:
“Imagine being on an island where more than one in five people have never heard of Cambridge Analytica, gammon is an old-fashion pork cut, 78 per cent of people don’t talk about politics most days, and 99 per cent of people don’t watch Prime Minister’s Questions.
“In fact that island exists, and you may well be on it now. It’s called Great Britain.”
The gammon controversy was a small, if nasty, storm-in-a-teacup stirred-up by, and largely limited to, political Twitter in the UK. However, the Cambridge Analytica story had trans-Atlantic repercussions:
“For weeks this story occupied the news, and political Twitter. It would be difficult to go near either, at any point during that period, without hearing the story or the fierce debate that it prompted.
“Yet when we asked the public, in polling conducted at the height of the scandal and published here for the first time, 21 per cent said they had not recently heard any news story about social media or data privacy. “
They probably did hear or see something about it, but clearly it didn’t register. What’s more the true number is probably higher than 21%, because, as Singh explains, there are always some people who claim to be familiar with a news story even when they’re not.
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