Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays
No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it.
Amanda Montell • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Echo chambers of other similarly minded people21 are already a common occurrence. But soon we will each have our own perfect echo chambers. It’s possible that these personalized AIs might ease the epidemic of loneliness22 that ironically affects our ever more connected world—just as the internet and social media connected dispersed subcultures. On
... See moreEthan Mollick • Co-Intelligence
Echo chambers lack that friction. So do “filter bubbles,” which are essentially the digital incarnation of echo chambers. In his book Filterworld , Kyle Chayka explores how personalized searching, algorithms, and online behavior flatten our culture by continually offering us more of what we’ve already consumed, shrinking our digital worlds.
🏡 I Don’t Resonate With You
Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous.