Mental health advocates blame the media for promoting stigma and discrimination toward people with a mental illness. However, the media may also be an important ally in challenging public prejudices, initiating public debate, and projecting positive, human interest stories about people who live with mental illness.

middle childhood

fighting ability was one way that this prayer was answered for some

Most bondsmen would have to mask their honor when confronted withaffronts and wait until a potential window of opportunity to seek redress; oth-ers displayed their honor at times by resisting dishonor

the code of honor among bondsmen assumed a “sacredness,”and transgressors would, among other retributions, have “their names cast outas evil from among their brethren, and being subjected to scorn, and perhapspersonal violence.”

In Africa fighters often exhibited their power on behalf of the enslavedcommunity in the enforcement of honor.

Others commanded respect fortheir demonstrated skill in physical contests such as climbing poles, wrestling,or knocking and kicking. Through these various forms of display, enslavedAfricans and their descendants exclaimed their individual worth and honor.The desire to seek such communal honor was clearly strong

an enslaved woman could gain honor in the eyes of the communityfor her ability to sing, hypnotize the community with engaging stories, or dancewith grace

black drivers who felt compelled by the honor code not to carry out orderedwhipping if the plantation owner was not immediately present.2

loyalty while enslaved

enslaved showed this respect toone another by hiding and feeding runaways and refusing to betray otherbondsmen

honor was loyalty to fellowbondsmen.

loyalty to peers, personal displays, vengeance, and resistance to dishonor

honor system of Africansand their descendants in North America was most clearly exhibited through

Europeans and their descendants in North America did not always recog-nize this bonded honor code, but southern elites lived by their own reflexivehonor system that led to violent gouging matches and later duels.2

Enslaved Africans carried strong concepts of honor to North America. As wehave seen, the pastoral Angolans held a tradition of reflexive honor in whichaffronts to honor were settled in stick fights.

oot doctoring and knocking and kicking acted as related sources ofempowerment

tricknology

However, when fighting from some physical disadvantage or when defendingoneself from a white oppressor, the ideal was to strike a butting-style headblow and finish the fight before it even developed.

style worked from an opening stance in which “each contestant placed onehand on his opponent’s shoulder at or near the collar line, and with the otherhe clutched his opponent’s arm directly above the elbow.”20 This style alsoincluded groundwork and became popular in America because it gave theadvantage to skill rather than size and allowed for contests between individu-als of different sizes

Similarly, the unarmed martial arts were living traditions that could spreadin the Americas even when only a few practitioners were introduced to aregion. As these arts had served as a base of support in difficult times in Africa,under the exceedingly horrific experience of racial slavery in the Americas evenlone martial arts masters may have been called upon to serve their new com-munities as sources of defensive leadership. These arts did not die with suchmasters but were effectively passed on horizontally (to peers rather than exclu-sively to progeny) even to those whose patrimony came from areas of Africaother than Biafra and southern Angola.

could leave their cultural mark on the future generations of thegeneral bonded population.

the enslaved community in a given region of the Americas, these populationscould at times call upon elements of their collective military traditions

the combination of trading patterns and pref-erences of European planters in the Americas for laborers of specific Africanethnicities tended to lump together large numbers of captive Africans from cer-tain areas into particular colonies in the Americas.

Biafran-derived war dances and closed soci-eties continued to act as vehicles for paramilitary actions in the Americas

remembered the martial traditions that could be calledupon in times of need

fight-ing styles would serve as means of setting various classes and communitiesapart

When he arrived on the coast some seven months later,Equiano met coastal Biafrans whose culture and language were completelyunfamiliar to him. In expressing this difference Equiano noted the foreignnessof their fighting style along with other traits: “All the nations and people I hadhitherto passed through, resembled our own in their manners, customs, andlanguage; but I came at length to a country, the inhabitants of which differedfrom us in all those particulars. I was very much struck with this difference,especially when I came among a people who did not circumcise . . . and foughtwith their fists among themselves.”5

Fighting for Honor

little empirical research

Relatively small minorities of unusually active and opinionated individuals often animate online debates, even as the vast majority of internet users pay little or no attention to these partisan discussions.

In summary, the picture on polarisation is complex and research is often limited outside the United States. Overall, ideological polarisation has, in the long run, declined in many countries, but affective polarisation has in some cases, but not all, increased. News audience polarisation is much lower in most European countries, including the United Kingdom. Much depends on the specifics of individual countries and what point in time one measures change from, and there are no universal patterns, suggesting country-specific factors drive national developments, including most importantly the behaviour of political elites and social dynamics.

broader changes in both news supply and media use, suggesting a relative decline in coverage of and attention to local politics and more focus on often more divisive national politics, also seems to be a possible contributor to polarisation in the United States (Martin and McCrain 2019).

using like-minded partisan media in the US can increase anger toward the ‘other side’ and make people more willing to share political information on social media (Hasell and Weeks 2016)

US studies find that exposure to like-minded partisan media under experimental conditions can strengthen the views of already partisan individuals (Levendusky 2013)

most people tend to congregate around a few popular news outlets and that all news sites – including partisan ones – attract reasonably ideologically diverse audiences

news media use is increasingly fragmented and polarised

refers to the structure of aggregate public attention to news media, to whether a country is home to large news outlets with both strongly left- and strongly right-leaning audiences, as opposed to outlets with mostly mixed or centrist audiences

find that levels of affective polarisation vary greatly by country (complicating the notion that polarisation is pronounced everywhere) and document considerable variation in patterns over time (belying the notion that a single universal cause – for example the spread of the internet – is driving polarisation everywhere)

affective polarisation clearly seems to be on the rise – as one team of researchers find that ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party

refers to how much opposing partisans dislike one another

Left/Right polarisation has decreased in many high-income democracies and electoral volatility increased, even as other divisions, sometimes over so-called “post-material” issues, have become more important

a range of different kinds of polarisation of the public, including ideological polarisation, affective polarisation, and news audience polarisation.

Polarisation, in social science, refers to divisions between groups

In summary, studies in the UK and several other countries, including the highly polarised US, have found very similar results whether relying on survey data or passive tracking data. Most people have diverse media diets, those who rely on only one source typically converge on large sources with politically diverse audiences such as commercial or public service broadcasters, and only small minorities, often only a few percent, exclusively get news from partisan sources.

“most social media users receive information from a diversity of viewpoints.”

many more internet users consume no online news at all than rely solely on partisan sources

Whether Democrat, Republican, or independent, the large bulk of these individuals’ media diets cluster around the center of the ideological spectrum

Using network analysis and combining TV and internet tracking data, Webster and Ksiazek (2012) find high degrees of audience overlap across news sources and concentration of audiences on large mainstream outlets.

potential size is limited by the fact that many people do not consume much online news in the first place

2013 election, estimate that 3% of people were in an entirely one-sided partisan media echo chamber

Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review

proportion of people in like-minded echo chambers in the UK during the election was 2% among Labour voters and 4% among Conservative voters – very similar to the results of survey-based work in the UK cited above

the notion that large numbers of people are cocooned in pure ideological news echo chambers, cut off from other points of view, is exaggerated and wrong

United States, researchers have long found that echo chambers are smaller and less prevalent than commonly assumed

formation of echo chambers was largely undercut by people’s common use of relatively impartial public service broadcasting

did not find strong evidence for widespread news echo chambers and observed that most people accessed “non-like-minded media” at least sometimes

while some people did engage in selective exposure to partisan news sources, rates were low overall, “suggesting a pattern of cross-cutting exposure more than isolated echo chambers.”

around 10% in the UK said they almost never see political content on social media that they disagree with

US is the main outlier among the seven and the only one where more than 10% of the respondents are estimated to rely only on partisan news sources

a minority of around 5% of people only use news sources with ideological slants in one direction

In the UK, the proportion of people estimated to be in a left-leaning echo chamber is around 2% and the proportion in a right-leaning echo chamber is around 5% (Fletcher et al. 2021b).

Across a range of different countries, including the highly polarised United States, several cross-platform studies – both those reliant on survey data and those reliant on passive tracking data – have found that few people occupy politically partisan online news echo chambers.

only surveys and tracking data can give a broader sense of what media space people occupy, as findings based on data from a single social media platform – virtually never used in isolation – cannot establish whether people inhabit a bounded, enclosed media space that magnifies messages while insulating them from rebuttal

it is important to recognise that (a) there is no single-source ground truth that captures all media use (online tracking data struggles to capture behaviour inside apps such as Facebook, does not capture offline use, and can have a hard time separating meaningful from superficial engagement), (b) surveys in particular are dependent on respondents accurately remembering and describing their media use (something many people struggle to do), and (c) news and information involve an irreducibly subjective component, as there is no objective standard for what does or does not constitute, for example, news as opposed to opinion or impartiality as opposed to partisan news, and sometimes no broad-based inter-subjective consensus either, complicating measurements

Differences in news use are partially aligned with differences in age, gender, education, and income

large minority of news lovers, about 22% of UK internet users, engaging with many different news sources on a regular basis across many different offline and online platforms, a majority of daily briefers (55%) who use a few different sources of news and a large minority of more casual users (23%) who often do not access news daily

differences in individuals’ active choices and regular habits play a defining role in the overall distribution of news use, tending towards greater inequalities

half of UK internet users in 2021 reported they had gone directly to a news website or app (e.g., BBC News, Guardian, Mail Online, HuffPost) in the past week, with the rest relying on offline sources and/or news accessed via platforms such as search or social media (Newman et al. 2021)

Second, there is an abundant supply of news online, but on average, people spend a limited amount of time with it and many internet users do not regularly actively seek out online news

we live in increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments

suggests echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, finds no support for the filter bubble hypothesis and offers a very mixed picture on polarisation and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarisation

documents the important role of self-selection, elite cues, and small, highly active communities with strong views in shaping these debates and highlights the role especially political elites play in shaping both news coverage and public opinion on these issues

In the specific context of the United States where there is more research, it seems that exposure to like-minded political content can potentially polarise people or strengthen the attitudes of people with existing partisan attitudes and that cross- cutting exposure can potentially do the same for political partisans.

News audience polarisation is much lower in most European countries, including the United Kingdom. Much depends on the specifics of individual countries and what point in time one measures change from and there are no universal patterns.

ideological polarisation has, in the long run, declined in many countries but affective polarisation has in some, but not all, cases increased

forms of algorithmic selection offered by search engines, social media, and other digital platforms generally lead to slightly more diverse news use – the opposite of what the “filter bubble” hypothesis posits – but that self-selection, primarily among a small minority of highly partisan individuals, can lead people to opt in to echo chambers, even as the vast majority do not.

most people have relatively diverse media diets, that those who rely on only one source typically converge on widely used sources with politically diverse audiences (such as commercial or public service broadcasters) and that only small minorities, often only a few percent, exclusively get news from partisan sources.