I hope you won’t mind if I put down a few thoughts about echo chambers. First, you connect them with “the ability to pick and choose our news sources.” The developed world has, of course, had that sort of ability for a couple of hundred years, at least in areas that were reached by newspapers: it seems to me that what the internet has actually done is to reduce the capital cost of broadcasting your opinion outside your own community. I can also think of numerous examples of “traditional” communities which were very far from echo chambers: for instance,the radical heresies of the Cathar villages documented in Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, or the religious discussions of seventeenth-century England documented in Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down.
But, of course, it doesn’t matter whether your picture of traditional society and opinion is true or not, except insofar as it illuminates our view of the present; and my worry is that the picture you paint is of a world in which people now have more opinions (or more visible opinions) than was the case throughout history. I’m not sure that this is true.
If it is the case that the cost of publishing an opinion has gone down, then I guess you would expect the number of different opinions to increase substantially — “quot homines, tot sententiae,” or there are as many opinions as there are people. I don’t know of any empirical research which would enable us to say what the actual growth in the number of opinions consequent on the dissemination of opinions via the Internet has been; but my feeling is that the use of the term “echo chamber” refers to a situation in which people group themselves together because they share the same (or a closely related) opinion or set of related opinions; and that that’s a way of saying that there aren’t nearly as many different opinions as one would expect (or like.)
Why might this be the case? Well, for my money it’s at least partly in the concept of memes. The memetic paradigm (for which, as far as I’m aware, there is almost no pre-Internet evidence) encourages the collapse of the individuality of opinion and its replacement by a model in which individuals are encouraged to consume pre-formed opinions and are delegated the task of disseminating them to others. This creates the situation we see, in which small numbers of heavily-funded meme producers can rapidly form groups which consume their opinions. These are the echo chambers we dislike. Perhaps not coincidentally, this process also greatly simplifies the task of companies whose business is redacting the opinions of their users into a form which can readily be marketed to advertisers.
Now, I’m not sure how this situation can be improved by scepticism (aka critical thinking.) I can certainly understand how the remarkable successes of science have been facilitated by peer review, and it seems to me that the call for critical thinking in news, debate etc. is based on the success of the peer review method in science. I also think — but please correct me if I’m wrong — that the Socratic methods you propose are in fact based on the same idea. But, to my mind, there are two reasons why the methods that have served science well are less likely to work for news and debate.
The first is that peer reviews in science work because they rely on pre-existing communities. I get very few requests to peer review articles on gravity waves (well, tell the truth, I’m still waiting for my first…) Is this because I don’t know the first thing about them? Actually, the gravity wave chaps haven’t the slightest idea whether I do or not; they just haven’t identified me as a member of the community of people who do know about them, which means that a) peer review is always carried out by members of the community, and b) I’m still hanging morosely round my inbox waiting for the call. There’s good material by Isabelle Staengers and Bruno Latour on these subjects (at least, I think it’s good, and hey, why wouldn’t you trust me?)
The second reason is that the sorts of things that we want to discuss are frequently not amenable to the sort of critical discussion you advocate. Let me take an example: you say in this article that FaceBook is meant to be a “ universal, neutral platform for everyone to share their thoughts, beliefs, experiences and lives.” Now, I happen to disagree with that. I think that FaceBook is a highly efficient machine for trussing consumers like chickens and delivering them to advertisers, and that it supports neutrality only insofar as that doesn’t interfere with its business objectives. My point, however, is that it doesn’t much matter what we think (particularly in my case, since you have numbers on your side.) The question is: what sort of criteria might we use to decide between these two positions? Both of them, as far as I can see, have some evidence that supports them; but in neither case is that evidence conclusive: and, for my money, it can’t be conclusive, since it’s a question about human communities, what they believe, and what you and I believe as parts of them. I apologise for the terse formulation, and am happy to expand if you would like me to.
The Socratic method, like peer review, works as part of a community. Scepticism tout court is simply corrosive — as Socrates himself criticised in the position of the Sophists. It seems to me that what you’re talking about is scepticism as part of a community (like the communities that run peer reviews:) scepticism which is alert to the nature and telos of that community, and is concerned to identify and condemn arguments and propositions which threaten the well.being of that community as well as to admit and promote propositions which enhance it. But strip the stupid rhetoric of many echo chambers away, and that’s what any echo chamber does. It seems to me that, if scepticism could destroy echo chambers, they’d have been long gone by now; and that a frontal assault of the kind I think you advocate is no more likely to succeed now than before.
I leave aside the argument that any commercial organisation (Google, FaceBook etc.) that lives by selling its subscribers to advertisers will never voluntarily alienate large numbers of its subscribers. That’s why we don’t actually have to worry about these initiatives. A few sacrificial lambs might be prepared and even sacrificed, and Mr. Zuckerberg might tweak his mission statement to sound even more motherhood; but, even in the short run, I can’t see mass exclusion as a likely option.
Sorry to have so comprehensively avoided shutting tfu; but, like Pringles, once you start…
