What Does Your Echo Chamber Sound Like?
What is an echo chamber? How does it distort your perspective and contribute to the ever increasing abundance of misinformation found in social media? In this article I’ll walk you through the steps you need to take in order to figure out if your social media (or any content platform) is in fact an echo chamber, and what you can do to remove those filter bubble walls around your online presence. Let’s start with the fundamentals. What exactly is an echo chamber? Here’s a video that will break it down for you in simple terms.
Moving on… are you in an echo chamber. No? That’s great — congratulations. You are a solid information connoisseur. If you answered yes, or maybe, that’s ok too. It just means that you are a like a lot of people out there and, you are being affected by confirmation bias. Good news though, there’s steps you can take to tunnel your way out of that echo chamber and neutralize your feed.
If you’ve taken steps to neutralize your feed, let’s take a look at how these things happen in the first place so we can work on prevention. According to this article, ever-increasing online polarization, fake news and algorithms have the upper hand when it comes to what information you are able to see (and what you’re prevented from seeing) regardless of how many different people/topics you are following.
Now let’s talk about “filter bubbles”. Filter bubbles are like the walls of your echo chamber… but without corners. When asocial platform suggest to curate content on your behalf, it will only show you content that you express an interest in, while filtering out anything new.
The internet is a vast cosmos so showing you posts based on your preferences might sound like a good idea. However, how are you supposed to broaden your horizons when all you see are the same things? Think about it — if you had to live in an actual bubble, how isolated would you feel?
Many people regardless of their generation have expressed feelings of loneliness and a sense of lower self-esteem that correlates from being too connected to social media. When the internet came into mainstream use, it did an excellent job of connecting people from all over the world. It opened up new horizons for even the most remote users. Then came the dreaded algorithms. Regulating what users could see and do. It reminds me of that scene in The Matrix… when all the comatose humans were in amniotic pods, guarded by parasitic sentinels. That’s kind of what we’ve become — hooked up to our digital devices that are crawling with digital trackers. Don’t think about it too hard though or you might give yourself an existential crisis. I know I do!
Finally, since most of us spend a large amount of our time browsing on our mobile devices, it would be a good habit to get into clearing the cache, deleting cookies and the data from our devices to reduce tracking and prevent more filter bubbles and echo chambers from forming. Who knows, we may just get some new information and broaden our horizons too. The instructions to do so for iPhone and android users can be accessed below.
