How free is the butterfly who does not spread its wings?
How free is the instrument if no one plays its strings?
How free is the giant ship when moored upon dry land?
How free is the ostrich whose head is in the sand?
How free is the bird once loosed, his cage now out of sight?… If the foolish avian refused to take flight?
Though I’ve said, “I’m free in Christ,” to walk by faith, I’ve failed. And though my chains have been untied, my boat has never sailed.
After my previous post, it is apparent to me that echo chamber posts are not going viral. I’m not too surprised. Wrestling with the idea and implications of echo chambers requires more than a cute meme and a few pithy quotes. After all, who wants to consider that their comfortable social/ideological confines may be a threat to democracy.
I remain convinced that awareness and understanding of echo chambers is important to personal and societal well-being. It is too simplistic to assign echo chambers sole responsibility for the deep division in our country. To do so is akin to assigning parents sole responsibility for the their children’s outcome. Echo chambers are incubators for our development as human beings, for good or ill. Echo chambers greatest peril for ill is their appeal to and nurturing of our natural inclinations toward tribalism, group think, confirmation bias and certainty.
There is equal 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.
The real problem with echo chambers therefore isn’t that they consist of people who believe the same things and whose discussions strengthen their beliefs. The real problem is that some of them are wrong — in their beliefs, their methodology, or, often, in both. David Weinberger
The most significant human trait that sustains and encourages the proliferation of and participation in harmful echo chambers is our unwillingness to entertain the possibility that we may be wrong.
Don’t forget to “like” this post so our like-minded friends can agree.
A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right , basically all the time , about basically everything : about our political and intellectual convictions , our religious and moral beliefs , our assessment of other people , our memories , our grasp of facts . As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it , our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient .
Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority , the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition . Far from being a moral flaw , it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities : empathy , optimism , imagination , conviction , and courage . And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance , wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change . Thanks to error , we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world .
… it is ultimately wrongness , not rightness , that can teach us who we are .
Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
The above quotes capture the paradox each of us find ourselves in as we strive for meaningful and authentic lives. An unrelenting pursuit of rightness is pitted against our incontrovertible fallibility. Amazingly, left to our own devices, rightness will almost always win out.
Our desire for rightness leads us to echo chambers where our “rightness” is amplified and error is filtered out. Like a butterfly from a cocoon, we emerge in the beauty of our rightness, confirmed in our infallibility.
The avoidance of controversial issues or alternative solutions creates a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. Rightness binds and blinds us. An “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty of our rightness) can prevail. Stereotyping of, and dehumanizing actions toward, dissenting persons can develop. As true believers we can produce fantasies that don’t match reality.
Interpersonal communication is stifled outside our echo chamber Immersion in the comfortable confines of an echo chamber result in significant losses, not the least of which, can be family and community relationships.Echo chambers reinforce our natural tendency to restrict our relationships rather than expand our social interactions.
Residing within an echo chamber strips our lives of serendipity and wonder. We trade off the opportunity to engage the endless diversity of the world around us. We are not unlike “an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (C.S. Lewis)
There is no price to high to maintain our rightness.
The Importance of Being Wrong
The most significant human trait that sustains and encourages the proliferation of and participation in harmful echo chambers is our unwillingness to entertain the possibility that we may be wrong. ( previous post) Without awareness and acceptance of our human fallibility, echo chambers will be a natural consequence in a society that is increasingly polarized.
…embracing our fallibility not only lessens our likelihood of erring , but also helps us think more creatively , treat each other more thoughtfully , and construct freer and fairer societies .
Schulz, Kathryn.
The challenge is how do we cultivate a healthy understanding and acceptance of our “wrongness”? I will attempt to address that challenge in my next post.
To err is to wander , and wandering is the way we discover the world ; and , lost in thought , it is also the way we discover ourselves . Being right might be gratifying , but in the end it is static , a mere statement . Being wrong is hard and humbling , and sometimes even dangerous , but in the end it is a journey , and a story . Who really wants to stay home and be right when you can don your armor , spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world ? True , you might get lost along the way , get stranded in a swamp , have a scare at the edge of a cliff ; thieves might steal your gold , brigands might imprison you in a cave , sorcerers might turn you into a toad — but what of that ?
Schulz, Kathryn.
This post is the fourth in a series about echo chambers.
My motivation for writing about echo chambers comes from a deep concern about the political and cultural climate that exists in our country today. The depth of division and polarization rivals the civil rights and Vietnam eras. Although protests and violence have not matched those eras, it seems that the potential for doing so is real.
It is my belief that echo chambers are an amplification device that fuels division and polarization that dominate our cultural landscape. Echo chambers are not new but a natural consequence of our desires as humans to confirm our rightness. My goal is not to eliminate echo chambers, they will always exist. What is important is to understand the dramatic transformation that echo chambers are experiencing through continued technological advances, particularly the emergence of social media and the impact they have on our culture.
We have unprecedented access to information in unlimited quantities controlled by algorithms designed to maximize information relevant to our personal lives. Such access has potential for positive impact on our lives. The driving force for the development and continued enhancement of social media is economic, not social/political or altruistic.
Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of social media, i.e. Facebook et al, is that it has become the drug of choice that feeds our insatiable appetite to confirm and reinforce our rightness. Essentially, our Facebook (or other social media) echo chamber is our “safe space” where we can fire our salvos of sometimes vitriolic and/or hateful rhetoric. Protected by anonymity and absence of personal interaction or accountability, we can finally fulfill our dream of “telling them what I really think”. A cursory review of comments in response to a controversial post can be shocking and disheartening.
Whatever our politics, inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill. Nicholas Kristof
The dynamics of echo chambers feed our natural inclinations toward tribalism.
Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically, tribalism. Genocides are tribalism – wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different faith or color, denial of evolution or climate change or other basic scientific truths when they challenge tribal beliefs. What stunning evidence of the power of tribalism!
It matters little whether our cause is right or wrong in terms of the effects of echo chambers on our society. As long as we believe we are right, we will find justification for our words and actions. The digital age has unleashed the latent malevolent nature of echo chambers.
The real problem with echo chambers therefore isn’t that they consist of people who believe the same things and whose discussions strengthen their beliefs. The real problem is that some of them are wrong — in their beliefs, their methodology, or, often, in both. David Weinstein
The most significant human trait that sustains and encourages the proliferation of and participation in harmful echo chambers is our unwillingness to entertain the possibility that we may be wrong. Without awareness and acceptance of our human fallibility, we will be vulnerable to the ill effects of echo chambers.
…embracing our fallibility not only lessens our likelihood of erring , but also helps us think more creatively , treat each other more thoughtfully , and construct freer and fairer societies .
Schulz, Kathryn.
The challenge is how do we cultivate a healthy understanding and acceptance of our “wrongness”?
If you read my previous posts you may remember my promise to address the above question in this post. I apologize. I underestimated the depth of the challenge. Hopefully, my next post will engage the challenge.
…embracing our fallibility not only lessens our likelihood of erring , but also helps us think more creatively , treat each other more thoughtfully , and construct freer and fairer societies .
Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (p. 18). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Previous posts:
This is my 5th post on the subject of echo chambers. If you haven’t read the previous posts or just don’t want to do so, below is a brief summary that will help get you to the subject of this post.
First, some clarification. These posts are not written to initiate/encourage a movement against echo chambers. My motivation for writing grows out of personal participation in my own echo chambers and significant life experiences that revealed my fallibility. Through no effort of my own, I have come to understand the impact and importance of echo chambers in my life. If is my purpose to present each reader with an opportunity for reflection and introspection. This is personal not corporate or political. To use a biblical metaphor, I hope that individuals will become leaven.
I believe it can be helpful to use the concept of natural frequency to understand the dynamics of echo chambers and how acceptance of our fallibility can reduce, perhaps eliminate, the negative/destructive aspects of echo chambers.
Natural frequency is the frequency at which a system tends to oscillate in the absence of any driving or damping force.1
With the understanding that I am not a physicist, let me propose an analogy of natural frequency to the physics of echo chambers.
Supposing the natural frequency of the echo chamber in which we reside is ƒ [rightness]. An external application of ƒ[rightness] will cause the echo chamber to oscillate and achieve resonance i.e. resonate with us. In simple terms, “they are playing our tune” or “on my wave length”.
So what’s the problem? The application of ƒ[rightness] at increasing amplitude can grow enough to, as in case of a glass, shatter the object. Perhaps my analogy breaks down with destruction, but I think, at a minimum, it supports Nicholas Kristof’s assertion: Whatever our politics [et al], inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill.
I do believe that if we are exposed to increasingly stronger reinforcement of our rightness, in the absence of any driving or dampening force, it will result in unhealthy (destructive) consequences. For the system (echo chamber) to achieve resonance and allow us to reside there healthily , there must be driving or dampening forces to protect the system.
It is my premise that awareness and acceptance of our human fallibility fills that requirement. I would also suggest that a natural frequency analogy supports the idea that individuals acting as leaven can be a force that prevents destructive outcomes.
Hopefully, this discussion has help to explain the importance of awareness and acceptance of our human fallibility. Unfortunately, in the face of our unrelenting desire to be right, the question of how to we achieve awareness and acceptance of our human fallibility remains. Maybe next time?