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 🤪
the danger of an echo chamber is the absolute repulsion of outside ideas or contributors regardless of the factual nature of the content. the mere attempt at bringing in new information is rejected.
if you have a ‘liberal space’ and some conservative attempts to bring fascist ideas to the table, they are not flat out rejected. they are admonished for the facts inherent in fascism.
if you have a conservative space, and you bring liberal ideas your ideas are not torn apart with pertinent conservative information, you are ejected from that echo chamber
In the process of doing that admonishing you are inherently changing the kinds of conversations that happen in that space.
Sometimes it okay to take some positions for granted so you can have deeper conversations about specific ideas and that only happens when there is agreement about certain facts.
Constant disagreement paralyzes action and is the same tactic that people use to sterilize social movements.
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