The term I researched for my Each One Teach One project was “Echo Chamber”. The simple definition of an Echo Chamber is an environment where a person only encounters opinions that reflect and reinforce their own. This goes hand in hand with the concept of confirmation bias as people are more likely to believe in things that coincide with their current beliefs and reject things that do not.
Echo Chambers are able to arise from a variety of sources and many people may be unaware that they are currently in an echo chamber. Echo Chambers often are the result of the formation of various groups and organizations. Those who lean more Republican or Democrat often will choose to accept information from others who support their side of the political spectrum. These groups do not have to be as large as political parties, as they can be small ones too like the group of friends a person chooses to associate with, or even groups a person may not be able to avoid such as family. Friends and family often will share some of the same views as you, or at the very least will try and be supportive by not arguing with what you believe, so they can indeed act as an Echo Chamber. Whether we know it or not, it is very likely that each of us are currently stuck in at least one, if not multiple echo chambers, but they can be hard to identify, and even harder to get out of.
Echo Chambers are especially relevant today because of our increasing reliance on the internet. Search engines such as Google use data and complex algorithms in order to show results more accurate to what the user wants and are more willing to click on. This creates a special breed of Echo Chamber that is tailored towards each of its users. If a person is convinced that the Earth is flat and is often on sites created by other people who believe the same thing, the search engine will automatically showcase similar sites, in turn creating an Echo Chamber. However this is not exclusive towards any one group or belief, as everything from religious beliefs, political affiliations, and geographic location can have its own Echo Chamber created from these search engines. With our increasing use of computers and the internet for things like the news, these Echo Chambers drastically influence the beliefs of the people, and help cause the spreading of misinformation within our society.
Echo Chambers have a large negative effect on our society. We have seen first hand some of the harm Echo Chambers can cause due to the limitation of communication caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. More people than ever were stuck inside and had no choice but to get their news from electronic sources. Choices like what news channel to watch or what news outlets online to view kept almost all U.S Citizens in a constant Echo Chamber, as social interactions and outside information was limited. This led to many citizens blindly believing what their chosen news source was telling them, and paved the way for the insertion of misleading information and propaganda, like the conspiracy theory that the democratic party had influenced the presidential election. For the future we as individuals need to recognize that the information we receive may not paint the full truth, and that we should do our part to pay attention to a wider range of sources, including those we may not feel comfortable with.
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/digital-media-literacy/what-is-an-echo-chamber/1/
https://theconversation.com/the-problem-of-living-inside-echo-chambers-110486
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/dec/04/echo-chambers-are-dangerous-we-must-try-to-break-free-of-our-online-bubbles
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