The Echo Chamber -- an Off Topic topic

Early enthusiasts, or at least the more idealistic types among us, hoped that the Internet would be one giant tool for spreading tolerance. Their argument boiled down to the idea that extremism of any kind was determined in large part by environment. If you were brought up under South African apartheid, you might have some very illiberal views on race. But had you been able to access foreign media and communicate freely with other people in places not under the same constraints, your views might have been altered. Given all the facts, people couldn't help but to see the error of their ways.

To a certain extent, this belief in the power of the Internet to change people's opinions has been borne out. The Chinese state would not be so assiduous in censoring websites were it not worried, justifiably, that the population's increasing exposure to different points of view might undermine its ideological grip.

But it turns out that unless there is a thirst for alternative information--usually among those who feel that their lives are unsatisfactory and that ideas are being withheld from them--people rarely go looking for it. If you hold a strong opinion about something and vehemently believe that you are right, you are extremely unlikely to search out anything that contradicts your world view. Our opinions are almost always based not on reasoned examination of all available evidence, but on emotional reactions and ingrained beliefs, and most of us don't enjoy the sensation of being contradicted. On the contrary, it tingles quite pleasantly to be confirmed in our views.

This truth is typically amplified rather that undermined by hanging out online. In cyberspace it's easier to find other people like you than it is in the real world. You no longer need to trawl record shops for obscure fanzines or track down an man who might know a guy who can tip you off about the political meeting that you're still a bit ashamed to attend. There;'s an Internet forum for everything and everyone, so you can find other fans of early-Eighties Scandinavian punk groups or your local branch of the Nationalist Socialist Party equally easily. Once you've made your way to the forum of your choice and discovered to your delight that their are plenty of other people who think as you do, a dose of the Online Disinhibition Effect [which happens to be article #07] will see you expressing all manner of views that you might keep to yourself if you were talking to your mother-in-law, or even to an acquaintance in a bar. Meanwhile the echo chamber works to bombard you with the message that this is all perfectly normal, because everyone else is doing the same thing. At least everyone you've ever met.

This is particularly true with it comes to political discussion forums, but applies to any emotive issue. You don't need to be lurking in the murky fringes of the Internet to notice it either. The reader comments below articles on the Daily Mail or the Guardian's website are enough too illustrate the power of the echo chamber at work. Commenters reinforce each other's opinions and frequently ramp up each other's vitriol towards anyone whose views are different. Even trolls (posters whose comments imply that they are being deliberately antagonistic) simply serve to further polarize the debate. By weighing in with an entirely opposite argument, the dialectic is strengthened and nobody has to bother with the uncomfortable work of actually listening to a reasoned alternative. The middle ground vanishes, and appeals for good behavior are useless, since naturally no one is prepared to admit responsibility for skewing the debate with their crazy ideas.

Added to this user-driven echo chamber is a technological factor that accelerates the process. Our experience of the Web is increasingly personalized. Some of that is controlled by us, by where we choose to go, but much of it happens via filters at levels we might not be fully aware of. At the benign end of the spectrum, having Amazon direct us towards novels we haven't read but will probably enjoy is clearly a great service. The way Amazon delivers that service is by examining what we have already clicked on, and offering up more of the same, or with slight variations, depending on how much of others' data shadow [Item #26] it can cross-reference with our own tracked searches.This is because computers are still nowhere near as good a making intuitive leaps as people. Netflix ran a competition for programmers to improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%. The $1 million prize goes to show the value of a good recommendation system. But even the new improved algorithms can't deal with things lie the anomalous fact that practically every film fan, of whatever persuasion, loves Napoleon Dynamite. Artificial intelligences just can't handle the surprise sleeper hits.

This tendency to narrow our choices may be technology driven rather than a thought-control conspiracy, but of course a personalized service--or, as we could think of it, an echo chamber can be embedded in your search engine--is still potentially scary. Google, or any other search engine, only display the results that it has decided you will be most interested in. That means that, in theory, it is perfectly possible that you could go through life without anyone challenging your opinion on that the National Socialists were the future of politics. Since we don't live in cyberpods, this is currently unlikely, but we already inhabit a virtual landscape that reconfirms our opinions constantly. For example, the growing personalization of search results means that two people searching for "British Petroleum" might get very different results. If one has previously searched frequently for, say Greenpeace, they could be presented with stories about the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. If the other reads the Daily Telegraph online every day, they'll be directed to BP's stocks and shares performance.

This can have serious consequences for public policy. Why is there still any kind of debate about the existence of anthropogenic climate change, long after the emergence of a consensus among scientists that it is indeed happening? One element of the explanation is that both sides spend a lot of time hanging out online in echo chambers. If you believe that man-made climate change is a scare story manufactured by the liberal elite, you will go to sites that confirm it is all a conspiracy. There is no way you'll end up on the Friends of the Earth website, fir a different take. Similarly, if you're a paid-up member of Friends of the Earth, everything you read online won't necessarily make you believe that climate-change deniers are selfish rednecks who don't care a dam about the imminent apocalypse, but it certainly won't make you any more sympathetic towards their point of view.

When crucial issues get lost in the echo chamber, society suffers. One way to think of the bipartisan deadlock in the United States politics is a face-off between two clusters of people who've spent so long in the echo chamber that they are genuinely horrified that the other lot even exists. And in times of crisis, this polarization is likely to get worse. Viewed from one angle, this looks dystopian. But of course, for us a individuals, life in our interconnected bubbles is simply more amusing and more convenient. A little bit more of what we like feels good to us.

That said, life isn't entirely libertarian in the heightened world of the echo chamber. Not when there are people willing to compose their own martial law on the wilder spaces of the Web.