Our bubbles: why we do not see the same world

None of us reads the news from nowhere. Long before we open a newspaper or scroll a feed, we have been told a story about the world: at home, at school, in the books we were given and the anniversaries we were taught to mark. Every country, and every family within it, carries its own collective narrative. We absorb it as children and rarely notice it as adults.

That narrative does not make us wrong. It gives us anchor points: the events we treat as obvious, the heroes we recognise, the dates that need no explanation. When new information arrives, we instinctively attach it to these anchors. Two people can read the same facts and come away with different conclusions, not because one is less intelligent or less honest, but because they are anchored in different places.

This is what we call our bubbles. The possessive matters: a bubble is not something other people live in. It is the subjective position from which each of us, without exception, looks at the world.

One war, several victories

Take the most studied event of the twentieth century. Ask an American who liberated Europe, and the answer often begins on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944. Ask a Russian, and the answer is the Great Patriotic War: the Eastern Front, where most of Germany's military losses were inflicted, and a Soviet death toll commonly put at around 27 million. Even the calendar differs: Western Europe marks victory on 8 May, Russia on 9 May.

Ask the rest of Europe, and the story shifts again. Each country places itself among the victors through its own acts of resistance. In France, the memory centres on the Resistance and the Liberation of Paris in August 1944. In Poland, it centres on the Polish Underground State and the Warsaw Uprising of the same summer, a story that the post-war decades made difficult to tell in the open. In the United Kingdom, the memory is that of a country that stood alone in Europe after the fall of France in 1940, held through the Blitz and never gave in: from the British point of view, the island that refused to surrender is the reason the war could still be won.

None of these narratives is invented. Each selects, from the same war, the part that its own society lived through and chose to remember. And the selection can move over time. In May 1945, a French poll by IFOP asked which nation had contributed most to Germany's defeat: 57% answered the Soviet Union and 20% the United States. When the question was asked again in 1994 and 2004, 58% answered the United States. The war had not changed; the bubble around it had. In the decades between, the French grew up with the Cold War, with American films and television, and with a Hollywood that told the story of the war again and again from the American side. It is hard to separate that shift from the weight of American soft power. A historical account that has not changed can be read very differently a generation later, depending on who tells the story most often and most loudly. In 2018, a YouGov survey found that half of Britons named Britain as the country that did most to defeat Nazi Germany.

What already exists, and where it stops

The idea that emotion and identity shape how nations see each other is not new. In The Geopolitics of Emotion (2008), Dominique Moïsi described the world through three dominant emotions: fear in the West, humiliation in much of the Arab and Muslim world, and hope in rising Asia. The framework is striking, but it works at the scale of whole civilisations. It says little about why two Europeans of the same generation can read the same event in opposite ways.

Eli Pariser's filter bubbles (2011) describe a different mechanism: the personalised environment that algorithms build around us online. Those bubbles are made for us, click by click. The bubbles we describe here are older and deeper: we are born into them.

Our model draws on a long line of work. Maurice Halbwachs showed in the 1920s that memory is collective, framed by the groups we belong to. Benedict Anderson described nations as imagined communities, held together by shared stories. Pierre Bourdieu's habitus captured how our social position shapes the way we perceive and judge. What we propose is to combine these layers and, above all, to measure them.

Three bubbles

The linguistic bubble. Language decides which newspapers we read, which debates reach us and which voices we hear first. English is by far the largest bubble, with around 1.53 billion speakers according to Ethnologue, and it overlaps with others: with Spanish in the United States and Latin America, with French in Canada. What happens outside our language often reaches us late, filtered or not at all.

Globalisation has not made the language bubbles equal. The English-speaking bubble has spread into the others through films, music, the internet and the platforms built in the United States. China, by contrast, has an economic bubble that keeps growing, yet its linguistic bubble travels much less: its social networks are largely domestic and written in Chinese, and they shape debates in other languages far less. X, formerly Twitter, is blocked in mainland China; the Chinese voices heard there come mostly from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the diaspora.

Twitter was the first social network to mix languages and nations in a single public square. Automatic translation is now pushing this much further. Since March 2026, X, owned by Elon Musk since 2022, translates posts by default into each reader's language using its Grok AI, where users previously had to click on a translate button post by post. Posts written in Japanese now reach English speakers, whose replies come back translated into Japanese. Masahiko Shoji, a professor of media sociology at Musashi University in Tokyo, described the wall around the Japanese-language bubble as "beginning to crumble", while warning that translation does not carry cultural context. A French reader can now stumble on an argument between Japanese and Chinese users without leaving their own language. Japan and China share a sea and centuries of history, and they still read the same story differently.

The historical bubble. Each nation remembers different events, or the same events with different weight. The Napoleonic wars remain a reference in Spain, where they are part of the national story, while they occupy a more distant place in French memory. The legacy of the Franco years is still a live question in Spanish public debate, yet it rarely enters Northern Europe's view of Spain. The Second World War is a constant point of reference in American public life, in a way it is not in every country that fought it.

The economic bubble. Our income and the sphere of influence we live in shape what we notice and what we take for granted: the American, European or Chinese spheres, each with its own trade ties, its own cultural exports and its own soft power. Two people who share a language but not an income do not experience the same news in the same way.

Where the bubbles meet

These bubbles are not separate. Each of us sits at the intersection of several of them, and that intersection is our anchor point. A Spaniard and a French person on the same salary share an economic bubble, but not a language or a memory, and so they read the same history differently.

The bubbles themselves are not unequal; what they produce is asymmetry. On a given subject, one bubble may care intensely while its neighbour barely notices. The Falklands, the Malvinas to Argentines, are a recurring subject in British and Argentine media. Elsewhere, the attention they receive depends on who lives there. The Argentine community is far larger in Spain than in France, so a Spanish newspaper that covers the islands will find more readers, and more clicks, than a French one. Inside a single bubble, a minority can start to shape what part of the majority sees. There are bubbles within bubbles. These asymmetries of attention and perception are where the most interesting questions lie, and they are what this series will study.

Measuring instead of asserting

A model of subjectivity can easily become subjective itself. Our own bubbles shape what we expect to find, and national bias is the hardest bias to see from the inside. That is why every claim in this series will be treated as a hypothesis, not a conclusion, and tested with data.

Language bubbles can be measured with speaker counts from Ethnologue and national censuses. Historical bubbles can be measured by how often an event appears in each country's press over time, using archives such as the GDELT database, by school curricula, and by opinion surveys like the ones quoted above. Economic bubbles can be measured through trade and investment flows and through indices of soft power.

Several of the examples in this article are still intuitions. Some will be confirmed by the numbers; some will not. Publishing the results either way is the point.

What comes next

Each article in this series will take one event and look at it from several bubbles, with the figures that measure the gap between them. Our subjects will include disputed territories such as the Falklands, the memory of Napoleon on either side of the Pyrenees and the long shadow of the Franco years. Above all, they will include the two World Wars: the last two truly global events, which have shaped today's world and our collective unconscious more than any others. An interactive map of the bubbles, built from the data, will accompany the series.

Statistics are our way of stepping outside our own bubble, at least partly. Numbers come from somewhere too, and we will always say where. But they give every reader, whatever bubble they live in, the same facts to argue from. Tell us where your own bubble sits, and where you think ours does.