This week I want to talk about echo chambers and black-and-white thinking. I’m not alone in being concerned about this. It’s actually becoming a bit of a hot topic item in major media outlets these days as people are starting to recognize the serious threat that echo chambers create for our democracy here in the US and for free and critical thinking everywhere. As we’ll go over, this is probably more a problem with political and religious thought than it is for other areas of interest such as music.

Why I became intereted in this, of course, is because the parallels with the us vs them thiniking that goes on in destructive cults were too obvious to miss. When man-made, social media mechanisms exist which serve to create echo chambers, serve to divide us instead of unite us or help us at least find common ground, then what you have is social media actually creating cult mentalities and that is always always always a bad idea.

Wikipedia: “In news media, the term echo chamber is analogous with an acoustic echo chamber, where sounds reverberate in a hollow enclosure. An echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a defined system. Inside a figurative echo chamber, official sources often go unquestioned and different or competing views are censored, disallowed, or otherwise underrepresented.”

When faced with opposing teams or competition, it’s natural for people to choose one or the other based on whatever biases they have and once chosen, to stick with it.

Dr. Nicholas DiFonzo in 2011 wrote an opinion piece based on his researches into rumors and social groups where he said “…most people tend to get ‘evidence’ to substantiate rumors from friends or sources of information that they trust. The fact is, Americans across the political spectrum tend to trust the news media (and ‘facts’ provided by the media) less than their own social group.”

Further, he said “In my research, when Republicans and Democrats were put in separate groups and each group was asked to discuss a derogatory rumor about the other party (e.g., ‘Republicans are uneducated;’ ‘Democrats give less to charity’) beliefs in these rumors polarized in predictable directions. When the discussion groups were mixed, this did not happen.”

The echo chamber effect reinforces one’s own present world view, making it seem more correct and more universally accepted than it really is.

If you want to know one reason, and probably a major one, for the increasing large divides in our society over the past two decades, may I suggest that social media may have something to do with this? And specifically the echo chambers that algorithms on social media create.

Originally, the internet was looked upon as a source of almost limitless knowledge. All the world’s libraries, private collections and of course, media could be digitized, indexed and made instantly accessible. But instead of meeting that amazing potential, our nature has only made the internet exaggerate what were already human failings in our reason and thinking.

Google started on September 4, 1998.

Facebook started in Feb 2004

YouTube launched on Feb 14, 2005.

Reddit launched June 23, 2005. Extreme echo chambers are called circle jerks

Twitter started March 21, 2006

Instagram came along in 2010

Critical thinking, at its very essence, requires the ability to examine disparate, even polar opposite, points of view simultaneously and find strengths and weaknesses in each side.

The algorithms that the owners of every one of these social media sites created were wholly and completley under their control and every one of them failed miserably in having the foresight or ability to predict that by feeding people only what they want to hear, they have altered the entire media landscape and have made it all but impossible for critical thinking to even begin to happen. Serious work is only being done now to t