The widely held belief of the echo chamber has been bothering me for a while now. I don’t question the phenomenon itself. It’s happened often enough; I totally agree this is a thing. What bugs me though is the idea that the root cause is members of a group agreeing too much.
Agreement is good wtf. Consensus should be a welcome occasional checkpoint. How are you even supposed to build healthy communities if you don’t share some common ground, like say equality for all. Sealioning is not a vaccine against radicalization. If anything the constant bickering from contrarians has the opposite effect.
Diversity may be a better sign of healthy community. Diversity of age, origins, gender, whatever. I don’t believe such a community turns into a radicalization timebomb for being like-minded. We need shared values to build upon, lest loneliness swallows us all.
Nevertheless I feel that obsessing over the homogeneous aspect of an echo chamber is mistaking the symptoms for the essence. My intuition is that the danger is in the discourse itself and to a certain extent in the platform used. I can’t say I’ve made up my mind on the specifics though.
What do you think? It’s OK if you disagree lol 🤪
Some of your post seems like it is a reaction to a specific anti-echo chamber critique, and if so that may be useful to share because some of the basic assumptions about what an echo chamber is or does seem erroneous to me. For example, when you say about echo chambers
Who said that they do, in the first place? Radicalized and radicalizing spaces tend to be echo chambers, but most echo chambers are not those. A heavily-moderated forum about Disney characters can become an echo chamber of pro-Disney viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to start churning out Unabombers.
Echo chamber doesn’t just mean a place with generally homogenous views, it means a space in which all but one viewpoint on a given topic has been eliminated, such that it becomes self-reinforcing and self-insulating (i.e. people in that space become more and more convinced of the viewpoint’s validity and prevalence, and people who do not share the viewpoint already become more likely to avoid the space).
Sure, but consensus in healthy communities is reached through everyone working together to make compromises and to convince each other, not by kicking or driving out anyone with an opposing viewpoint. And “opposing” in this context doesn’t mean inimical or hostile, it just means non-agreeing.
Consensus does not mean unanimity, it just means the agreement of the group as a whole. In a healthy group, a consensus is reached when the plan/ idea has been revised until everyone is on board with it. Kicking people out until only people who agree with the initial plan remain is not healthy consensus-building or community-building.
“It’s either build an echo chamber or allowing sealioning” is a false dichotomy. You can moderate a space well to keep out bad-faith or enemy actors without creating an echo chamber.
It seems like you’re using “echo chamber” to mean “safe space”, but they’re not the same thing. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this: we’ve got quite a lot of disagreement on any given major issue, but we don’t allow bad actors to remain in the space. There are myriad different Left-oriented philosophies and viewpoints and worldviews, and they’re (generally) all welcome here, but we’re not an echo chamber; you can go into any thread on Palestine and see that there is a lot of disagreement between members on the subject.
Once again, I feel like your post is in response or reference to some specific argument or example. Who is obsessing over echo chambers? What discourse about them are you responding to? The discourse on echo chambers is going to differ quite a bit depending on who you’re talking to, and where. If you go into a conservative space like Xitter, it’s more likely to be being thrown around inaccurately to attack any non-conservative space. If you go on Reddit, it’s more likely to be talking about actual echo chambers. Echo chambers are bad, but not everything that gets called an echo chamber is one.
I was about to post this as a rant under this article, which was shared here some time ago and which doesn’t sound conservative at all. The passage that was the drop for me was:
But this had been a pet peeve of mine for a while so it was a drop that spilled the glass moment and I felt like addressing this in particular. So yes you’re right that this is an anti critique. I think what revolts me is that this sounds like a direct rebuttal against solidarity and yet another thing pushing for even more individualism and ultimately loneliness.
Thank you for sharing this, it definitely helps clarify the discussion.
I don’t think this article is really about echo chambers (and it never uses the term), I think it’s about (if I had to coin a name for it) performative conformity. The article points out how Democrats and Republicans tend to trend towards different lifestyles, not necessarily based on actual informed dislike of their counterparts’ choices, but because those things are signifiers of their group affiliation. Buying a lifted pickup to appear conservative, for example. I don’t think the author has an issue with this intrinsically, except when it becomes an entrenched position that prevents reflection on your own beliefs.
Now, the thing I heavily disagree with the author about is that “polarization” equates to “radicalism” or “extremism”. Polarization is about the degree of separation between 2 things. If everyone in American was either Far-Right or Extreme-Far-Right, there would be minimal polarization, but no lack of harmful extremism. Hell, what constitutes extremism is even based on your baseline of “normalcy”, so in order to equate polarization with extremism, you have to be erroneously conflating your own beliefs with “normalcy”. Clearly the author thinks he’s a ‘Centrist’.
Reading more about the author, Robert B. Talisse, I’m fairly unimpressed. He’s written several books on epistemic pluralism, basically arguing that there are many different, even opposing Truths, which are all valid because Truth is about pragmatic outcomes, and we should always be exposing ourselves to opposing views in order to continually refine our beliefs, a la the Scientific Method of testing hypothesis. That’s great in theory, but if a given system of belief has been analyzed and found lacking, why should we still be engaging with it?
I don’t need to constantly debate Nazis to know that Nazism is still bad. I don’t constantly need to re-measure the Earth to know it’s still round, just because some fools believe it’s flat. Both in science and in philosophy, there are settled Truths, and the presence of people who fail to understand them doesn’t threaten them.