Let’s say there is a tulip lovers club, where they talk about tulips, their variations and how to grow them. Let’s say someone new joins the club, this new person starts saying that tulips are rubbish and that roses are better or something like that. This person becomes so insistent with these statements that they end up being kicked out of the club. Before leaving, the person calls the club an “Echo Chamber” about tulips.
Would this person be right?
It’s all about execution everyone should be questioning themselves if they are correct in there thinking and creating an atmosphere of wanting to be proving wrong. If I join the group with an agenda of tearing down the group then no it’s not an echo chamber when I get kicked out. But if I join and then notice something about the tulips like they use too much water or are bad for the soil and I bring that evidence with the intent to have a good faith discussion about it. But I’m still kicked out that’s is an echo chamber.
the former is always confused for the latter; especially on lemmy.
Interesting take. Yeah, if good faith criticism is silenced, it’s a clear sign there’s something fishy
Sure, from their perspective it’s an echo chamber for tulip lovers. In the end it’s a subjective pejorative, not necessarily a hard descriptive.
It also implies that actively ignoring opposing viewpoints is a negative thing.
There are plenty of negative and harmful things to exclude that don’t result in an echo chamber. Excluding nazis for example is not being a real echo chamber because there will never be anything new that could be said to keep it from being a hate based ideology.
If you want to read about it, I recommend “echo chambers and epistemic bubbles”, by Thi Nguyen. It’s a good paper to understand this topic deeply.
Link: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2018.32
Man there was a video a while back about how echo chambers are actually probably not a huge factor in polarization in and of themselves, but that people are actually polarized when they encounter opinions in ways that drive them away from those opinions. Wish I could find it, it was really compelling and I can’t do the topic justice.
It was on YouTube or anywhere else?
YouTube. I’ll see if I can find it in my google history or something.
On a general note. Older people want to say that social media has an echo chamber effect and reinforces bad beliefs. And you probably hear this from people with all variety of political beliefs.
I’ve read several studies indicating that’s not true. Indicating that people aren’t as polarized as others say they are, and also indicating that social media did not lead to greater polarization. But there’s tons of data I haven’t read, so don’t cite me.
Personal knowledge, from both myself and many of my friends, is that before the Web we were far more limited in getting information, which was a problem for people who grew up as minorities, in various ways. And I believe that was a far worse problem than whatever your Facebook group might be causing.
Were they kicked out solely for having a differing opinion? Then it’s indisputably an echo chamber
Do the members seldom here opposing opinions outside of strawmen arguments or the occasional troll? Then it’s a defacto echo chamber
All organizations with common interests run the risk of becoming one, but the trap is particularly insidious for (and often weaponized by) online communities
