Pathway to Surviving and Thriving in Echo Chambers (14)

Pathway to Surviving and Thriving in Echo Chambers

Coming to the conclusion of this series of posts, the intent is to suggest some understandings I believe necessary to navigate the turbulent waters of life in a society dominated by echo chambers.

For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. In the rise of naked partisanship and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste, all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable.And increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.
Obama farewell speech

Accepting that echo chambers are a fact of our existence in today’s society, two important questions remain. First, how can we survive that experience? Secondly how can we thrive in the on-going reality of echo chambers?

To survive the experience of echo chambers, it necessary to understand the breath and depth of the peril we face.

• Echo chambers can be a catalyst for evil.

The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin in because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost. How can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil?
M. Scott Peck – People of the Lie

Certainty, conviction, and dogmatism reduces our anxiety in the face of life. Having all the answers feels good. That’s the upside. The downside is that certainty, conviction, and dogmatism makes you suspicious and wary toward people who have different beliefs. And that suspicion sows the seeds of intolerance.

Richard Beck

• Residing in echo chambers can be dehumanizing.

Living in an unmitigated echo chamber can dehumanize ourselves and our dissenters. It is a dark place that brings out the worst in us. Erwin McManus describes that place as a biopsy of our souls. A context where what is inside of us is pulled out and made public, revealing any malignancy within us. Aberration becomes normal.

A relentless bombardment of filtered information and media affirms and reinforces our beliefs and biases. The deeper our convictions about our rightness, the more we believe we are omniscient. In essence, we transmute into God and cease to be responsible to anyone but ourselves. In that sovereignty,  we are no longer restrained by a virtuous human nature, but are free to act in ways, inhuman or otherwise, necessary to protect our rightness. We abdicate our humanness . Correspondingly, we see our detractors as less than human and deserving of our actions.

We all seem to exist in huge feedback loops, squelching dissent, and growing more extreme in our thinking, blithely ignoring evidence that our respective positions might be wrong. In fact, we want little to do with each other.
Michael Frost

In the absence of a realistic understanding of echo chamber’s potential for malevolent outcomes, we will be content to revel in our self-delusion of omniscience.

In the digital age, it is unrealistic to think we can opt out of echo chambers in our daily experience. The important question is, how can we thrive?

Five keys to thriving in echo chambers.

1.  Recognize and cultivate the positive potential of echo chambers.

There is opportunity for good. Echo chambers can function as a “deliberating enclave”.

…“enclave deliberation,” … defined as “that form of deliberation that occurs within more or less insulated groups, in which like-minded people speak mostly to one another.” … (Sunstein)

The main value of deliberating enclaves is not that they increase conversation across differences, but that they enable like-minded people to make progress in what they agree about.

2.  Continually seek to be self-aware.

The human mind is an overconfidence machine . The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine . David Brooks

3.  Continually evaluate your beliefs.

A good place to start [evaluating beliefs] is to be particularly critical of sources that support your beliefs. “I’m always the most suspicious of beliefs that I have or conclusions that I come to that are in line with my own ideology,”  “So if I have a particular worldview and something supports my worldview, then I have to be especially suspicious of it. Because that’s when I’m going to be most vulnerable. Because that’s when I’m going to be most vulnerable. That’s when my motivated reasoning and confirmation bias are going to try hard to engage… but that’s exactly when you should question it the most. It’s a high-energy state, and it takes a lot of vigilance and a lot of practice and a lot of dedication. It’s a life-long practice, and there’s no shortcut to that. You just have to really be dedicated to policing your own thinking.”
Dr. Steven Novella

4.  Intentionally engage dissenting beliefs through media and relationships to achieve understanding.

Alex “Sandy” Pentland in “Beyond the Echo Chamber” commends the concept of social exploration.

Social explorers spend enormous amounts of time searching for new people and ideas—but not necessarily the best people or ideas. Instead, they seek to form connections with many different kinds of people and to gain exposure to a broad variety of thinking. Explorers winnow down the ideas they’ve gathered by bouncing them off other people to see which ones resonate.

5.  Never forget that you are fallible. With every interaction we experience, we must remind ourselves “I could be wrong.”

“Truth is not something we possess, it is, hopefully, a goal to which we strive.”  M. Scott Peck

Epilogue:

This post concludes a six month journey which began during our winter hiatus in Florida. An excerpt from my first blog post explains why I began writing on the subject of echo chambers:

The subject of echo chambers has become increasingly personally relevant. After recognizing my self imposed political/social echo chamber, I made a decision to dampen the echoes and open myself to different sources.

My efforts have met with mixed success. The peril of trading one echo chamber for another is real. The most significant result of my decision, thus far, is that it has become a catalyst for more serious thought and investigation into the character and nature of echo chambers. This blog post is the first, in what I hope to be a series of posts, addressing questions, ideas and issues that I have encountered related to echo chambers.

Although this post concludes this series, the subject remains of significant interest to me. I have been sensitized to the reality of echo chambers and there are few days that I do not encounter explicit or implicit references to them in my reading or listening. I expect that I will continue write on the subject.

In the beginning, as I became more and more interested in echo chambers, my enthusiasm and passion grew. I initiated this series of blog posts through which I hoped to stimulate some interest on the part others. My assumption was that everyone would see the importance of understanding echo chambers. It did not take long to discover that conversation about echo chambers ranked somewhere behind conversations on race and religion. In an attempt to receive some constructive criticism, I asked numerous people if they would read my posts and give me feed back. With one or two exceptions, my requests went unheeded. Although disappointing, that experience confirmed what I was learning about the difficulty  of addressing the challenge of echo chambers personally and societally.

Additionally, I experienced the reality of  Facebook’s ability to control and influence the information we send and receive. Based on anecdotal evidence, I found that my blog posts on echo chambers, unlike other subjects, rarely showed up on my friends timelines. I interpret that as a result of impersonal algorithms, not something directed to me personally. Unfortunately, the result is the same.

I am undeterred in my belief that echo chambers are a threat to our democracy but more importantly, a threat to our humanity.  M. Scott Peck states it well:

The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.

George Ezell
Wilmore, KY