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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
The Dean campaign's demise threatens to tar the whole Internet as an "echo chamber" -- but the real closed system is in the mass media.
Feb 20, 2004 | I'm a little confused about the meme du jour, "echo chambers" -- those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them. Here are three places I frequent that seem to fit the bill:
First, I'm on an invitation-only mailing list for moderate lefty Democrats interested in the intersection of ideology and technology. We are all committed to dumping Bush and there's no real possibility we're going to change our minds. Want to argue about it? Not here. We have other things to talk about.
Second, I used to participate occasionally in the Dean weblog comment boards. If you went there to argue that Bush was more deserving of our votes, people would either ignore you or brand you a troll -- and then ignore you.
Third, this fall I went to a baseball game and cheered the Red Sox more loudly than if I had been the only one yelling. My bleacher mates were surprisingly unwilling to talk with me about whether the Sox were deserving of our collective support.
Are any of these really echo chambers? This meme turns out to be as tricky as it is attractive. Worse, as it spreads itself, it's shifting shape, so that the entire Internet can start to seem to be nothing but a set of sealed rooms, each constructing -- and then confirming -- reality out of nothing but proclamations of prejudice and wishes. In echo chambers, the argument has it, the sound of our own voices can drown out fast-changing reality, as supposedly happened to the Dean campaign's online legions.
This is a myth just waiting to concretize into common wisdom. For example, Philip Gourevitch, in the New Yorker, writes: "[Dean's] following, forged largely in cyberspace through online communities, had the quality of a political Internet bubble: insular and sustained by collective belief rather than by any objective reality."
Before we use the failure of the Dean campaign to prove that the Internet routinely creates echo chambers, we'd better be sure that the concept of an echo chamber even makes sense, for the focus on this meme simultaneously distorts the value of the Internet and diverts attention from the truly dangerous echo chambers in our society.
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While most of us had assumed that the Internet would increase the diversity of opinion, the echo chamber meme says the Net encourages groups to form that increase the homogeneity of belief. This isn't simply a factual argument about the topography carved by traffic and links. A "tut, tut" has been appended: See, you Web idealists have been shown up -- humankind's social nature sucks, just as we always told you! Furthermore (says the memester), you Deaniacs were self-deluding, weak-minded children: Wake up and smell the depressing coffee!
The facts are not in question. They show that the links-to-blogs curve follows a "power law," that people tend to buy books that express similar values and views, and that a small number of sites get a disproportionate amount of traffic. But the echo chamber meme, with its "tut, tut," doesn't follow from those facts. It rides on a rationalist view of conversation, defining conversations as the exchange of information with the purpose of discovering truth and changing minds.
Talk about your foolish optimists!
The play of agreement and disagreement is far twistier than this rationalist picture assumes. Conversations iterate differences within agreement. On the lefty mailing list, for example, the participants agree that the Bush administration is apocalyptically bad, so we don't spend time arguing about that. We do robustly argue about what can be done to change the country's direction. We'll happily engage on whether the e-voting machine issue could mobilize the country, or how campaign technology can be integrated. But someone who wants to argue that Bush is a great president is going to be told to "take it offline." The fact that conversations start from a base agreement is not a weakness of conversations. In fact, it's a requirement.
That initial agreement isn't always implicit; it can become a rallying cry. On the lefty list, for example, we don't send a lot of messages that say Bush is a jerk, because we already agree on that and want to talk about what to do about it. On the Dean comment board, though, there were frequently comments that said, "Go Dean!!!", plus or minus a few exclamation marks. Yet even there, most messages iterated differences: How well the governor did in a debate, what he ought to say to Sen. Kerry, why a particular news story was unfair. A message board that only had variants of "Go Dean!!!" (or "Hillary sucks!" on a right-wing board) would quickly lose participants -- it would be too boring.
This explicit repetition of the founding agreement is the only salient characteristic I can find of what are called echo chambers. And from this I conclude: So what?
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