This is an awesome read for the college classroom. It lays out a framework for understanding how political formations originally develop and are subsequently policed by communities ensconced in an echo chamber where the same information and perspective gets reinforced over and over again. Clearly influenced by his own dedication to his own self-construction, the author, Dr. Nguyen, calls for an "epistemic reboot" :
He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust. It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.
Hmm, I like that thought that—alongside people and programs that we trust—we can actually expand our sense of selves through great devotion and an open search for discovery.
This is ideally what rests at the heart of the educational enterprise that is itself NOT an echo chamber, but at most, a process that results in "epistemic bubbles," or ways of knowing that often burst, reflecting a process that we may otherwise refer to as "growth," "evolution," "learning," or "intellectual maturation."
This piece helps make the argument that while we may have our own epistemic bubbles, or ways of knowing in Academia, they are very unstable, helping us to deny the allegation that we are indoctrinating youth, on the one hand, while telling a more hopeful story of how what we all read and learn not solely liberates, but also transforms, us into being better students, scholars, and human beings, accepting of others' dignity and inalienable right to not just exist, but to thrive.
Angela Valenzuela
Reference
Nguyen, C. T. (2018). Escape the echo chamber. Aeon Magazine, 12. https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2021/labs/10/chamber.pdf
Edited by Sam Dresser
Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just
that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the
same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no
longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the
truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance
has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in
echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an
intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages
and social media feeds.
But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
Current usage has blurred this crucial distinction, so let me introduce a somewhat artificial taxonomy. An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview. But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests. When we take networks built for social reasons and start using them as our information feeds, we tend to miss out on contrary views and run into exaggerated degrees of agreement.
An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.
In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
Let’s start with epistemic bubbles. They have been in the limelight lately, most famously in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017). The general gist: we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. Our Facebook feed consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, the majority of whom share our own political and cultural views. We visit our favourite like-minded blogs and websites. At the same time, various algorithms behind the scenes, such as those inside Google search, invisibly personalise our searches, making it more likely that we’ll see only what we want to see. These processes all impose filters on information.
