I’ll tell you why I’m pretty liberal with my block button and cool with my echo chamber. There are people out there who want me dead for liking my same sex. My trans friends are being legislated against / threatened with violence not because of science or health, but because of feelings and religion. I have family that emigrated legally being exposed to horrific racism and the threat of violence.
Do you support human rights? Or do you support death to the “other” ? Makes my choices easy. Not to mention I prefer actual truth to my information sources, not tabloid fluff designed to keep me enraged.
not american.
but echo chambers are cool in a way that goes beyond politics. it provides perceptible feelings of unity, belongingness, and validity to those that seek them. apes together strong kind of deal.
and since politics is about social issues, I don’t see why not.
Going to build on this to highlight something:
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Given the hyper-stigmatized, hyper-partisan approach to… well, a lot of things these days, not just US politics, engaging with those you politically disagree with is likely to not just produce calm disagreements but sharp, even vicious statements that your entire worldview/lifestyle/culture/ethnicity/whatever is literally the stuff of pure evil, and you are an absolutely terrible person for adhering to it. No nuance, no consideration, no empathy.
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On a different tack, consider that strong rejection/disagreement is shown to activate the same centers in your brain which are associated with sharp physical pain. To your brain, being slapped in the face conversationally and slapped in the face physically produce extremely similar results.
With these two points in mind, consider: Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
Unfortunately, the current palette of social media options don’t really offer spaces for nuanced, thoughtful discussion which doesn’t begin with people screaming their hostility to what they disagree with. It’s a big of a chicken-and-egg question whether that’s a cause or an effect, but the net result is creation of an environment which our pain-avoiding brains guide our choices away from people we disagree with.
Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
People commonly have a framework where they think of the slap as having kind of, occurred beforehand, right, and then they see themselves as slapping back whenever they respond, which is another part of why political discourse is so polarized and bad faith basically at all times.
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Because the opposite echo chamber is filled with lying liars who lie? ;)
You can’t take someone from an echo chamber, present them with facts, and change their mind. In fact, the opposite is true. They double down on what they think they already know.
It feels like politics in America is a game of team sports. Red vs Blue. No compromising, you either win or lose.
Pretty much, except that the Democrats ALWAYS compromise, resulting in a slow creep to the right over the last 50 years.
One whole “echo chamber” was built on stigmatizing the mainstream news which by definition means they’re pushing alternative news.
The only news I’m interested in are the facts. I avoid opinion articles or “framing” as much as I can.
If we’re calling factual reporting an echo chamber then fine. I guess the answer to your question for me is I like my echo chamber because the truth matters.
The “echo chamber” narrative only serves to legitimize and “both sides” bullshit.
Yep sometimes the widely accepted, popular view is the correct one.
I think people expressing opinions to othet that they don’t agree with makes people uncomfortable. People tend to avoid feeling uncomfortable. Also some people get angry when they get uncomfortable.
Its hard to have an meaningful conversation with someone who is angry.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that Americans define themselves by their politics. Where I’m from people will usually say, “I voted for X” but in the US it seems people say, “I am a republican/democrat”.
Also the concept of registering as a democrat/republican. Is that just for being able to vote for your preferred party’s nominee in the pre-selection phase? It seems like it would go a long way towards mentally committing you to how you vote in the actual election.
Regarding party selection, yes that’s exactly right. It’s for the primaries, which selects the candidates for that party, and people do tend to vote along party lines.
One thing that keeps me in my echo chamber is people not coming to debate in good faith. I’m generally all for listening to me ideas and viewpoints, but I find that so many people I talk to just want to convince me I’m wrong.
Before the 2016 election when thedonald was in full swing on Reddit, I thought it would be good to get both sides and entertained it for a while. What I got were the most vitriolic, ignorant, and disingenuous headlines and comments clogging my feed. So ya, I blocked it. If a huge part of a platform is pushing horseshit I don’t feel the least bit bad about blocking it.
A lot of people think that, yet still debate in bad faith when provided with evidence etc.
For a rather unsettling take, you may be interested in the concept of the digital panopticon. Because of the degree of surveillance that is possible in what media we consume, it’s also possible that we are intentionally being kept in these echo chambers.
It’s exhausting to have to teach people who don’t want to listen.
Because self-reflection is hard and most people have been taught that it’s equivalent to “hating yourself, your country, etc…” Taking an honest look at your own faults is inordinately hard for most people, so they would rather double down on their own wrongness, regardless of evidence.
Because it makes them feel that even though they can’t be successful or safe, they can be right.
It’s not just a US thing. It’s human nature and tribalism. People will generally stay in spaces where they are validated, other people agree with them, and their beliefs are reinforced.
Because every space is an echo chamber to some extent. Mod = God gets abused way too often, so why talk somewhere you risk getting banned from if you can avoid it by staying in spaces that already support your views?
Lack of curiosity. It’s exhausting to deal with political realities like 24/7 and perceive the world in a constant hyper politicized lens, without also becoming a schizo crazy person. The easiest way to prevent all this,but still be able to rationalize and make sense of the world in front of you, is to be able to slot yourself into a nice clean prepackaged category, where your information can be run through the filters for you, and you don’t have to really rationalize new stuff or critically think.
This even extends to spaces outside the echo chamber if you do it long enough, because your language changes so much that your opposition is basically incapable of actually communicating with you. It’s pretty easily witnessed in conservative echo chambers, where they’ll say that, this or that is woke, this or that is communism, but the same also applies in reverse where people assume academic definitions to be “true”, which is basically nonsensical as far as linguistics goes.
So, basically, it’s easy, so it’s default, and it’s totally inescapable, both existentially and just in terms of the raw media landscape being totally comprised of polarizing hackery.
Most people pretty much live their lives thinking they have the right opinions about pretty much everything. Then they think that people closest to them are more or less the same but the further you get from yourself the more wrong they are and then the opposition is basically wrong about everything. It takes quite a bit to admit to yourself that you’re most likely entirely wrong about a lot of things just as well as the “opposition” is right about some of the stuff you absolutely hate to even think about.
If you don’t hold any views you know would make your side of the political isle disagree with you then you’re most likely in a echo chamber.
