Weblogsky: Echo Chambers

« John Mackey's business philosophy | Main | What climate change? »

Echo Chambers

In my Demfest post, I said The partisan thing makes me uncomfortable somehow, so I often keep it at arm's length. I was thinking about that at the "Bloggers' Breakfast" this morning, where I realized why strong partisanship bothers me. There's an echo chamber effect, and I could see it clearly among the bloggers at DemFest, most of whom are clearly reading each other and generally agreeing, but they're not reading and thinking outside their sphere. I don't want to seem to critical of this - as Joi Ito said, "Many people blame the failures of the Dean campaign to this "echo chamber" and point to this "echo chamber" as a problem that is prevalent on blogs. I do see the risks, but I don't think criticizing the existence of communities or friendships is the solution. I think that communities and friendship are the foundations of trust and love and I do not agree that an aggregate of facts and single voices are the solution to finding the "ultimate truth" in writing." He suggests that "the goal is to bridge many communities and try to expand one's notion of community the largest possible size," and "one way to increase the size of the community one identifies with is to participate in multiple communities or to include members from other communities."

David Weinberger also addressed the question of echo chambers, concluding that "the Internet as a whole presents the broadest range of opinion, belief, feeling and creativity in the history of civilization. If you are not on the Net, you are limited to a diminishing selection of outlets expressing a diminishing range of views. Stories are picked up and replayed. Master narratives determine, with the rigidity of a machine for extruding plastic, the basic way of presenting those ideas."

No, if you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views. The fact that these media explicitly present themselves as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes them far more pernicious than some site designed to let people examine the 8,000 ways Hillary is a bitch or to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on "Buffy" than he'll ever be on "Angel." And if you want to see the apotheosis of the echo chamber -- the echo echoing itself so perfectly that it comes perilously close to achieving the 60-cycle om of the empty mind -- consider a president who, rather than read the newspaper, is happy to have his aides pick and choose what headlines he learns more about, because he believes them to be "objective."

We are at a dangerous time in the Internet's history. There are forces that want to turn it into a place where ideas, images and thoughts can be as carefully screened as callers to a radio talk show. The "echo chamber" meme is not only ill-formed, but it also plays into the hands of those who are ready to misconstrue the Net in order to control it. We'd all be better off if we stopped repeating it and let its sound fade.

So who am I to repeat it here? As Trei Brundrett and I discussed this morning, there's a reason to be concerned about strong partisanship and the potential development of insular communities or "echo chambers," and that's the potential to exclude. This gets back to Paul Woodruff's comments about the original concept of democracy and its requirement to "cultivate harmonious ways of accommodating...differences." This means that, at some point, the partisan have to transcend partisanship and listen to other voices than their own – you can't accommodate differences without hearing them and and attempting to understand their drivers and their logic. Though strong partisanship may be just what's needed now to take the USA back from the extreme right and restore balance, we should make sure that it's balance we find.

jon posted this at 11:27 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend