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 🤪
I’m not much of a relativist to be honest. In fact I feel your statement about the root cause of echo chambers is broad to the point of swallowing itself. It’s important to differentiate opinion from fact (I’m not expecting everyone to agree with me about black licorice being delicious, or about every public policy) but I disagree that all worldviews are mostly bias. If you really think it’s all bias, how can you even state that as fact? Do you really have that much distance with your own worldview?