Do a search for “echo chamber,” “fake news,” or “post-truth” nowadays and you’re likely to get more than a few hits in the current news. In the wake of Brexit and more recently the U.S. elections, it appears we are now once again in a time when everything is questionable, even our general faith in people.
Yes, we’ve been faced with the threat of international terrorism and global climate change for over a decade now, but there has always been at least a modicum of belief that the majority of people will ultimately opt for the greater good.
But first Brexit, then after a particularly mean and dirty knock-down drag-out election, Trump; the world is starting to look like a fighter stunned by a one-two combination and left dangling from the ropes right at the start of the match. And there’s another fourteen rounds to go.
The echo chambers on the internet and in social media are, however, secondary constructs. The fundamental problem is the individual echo chamber. When we trawl the internet for news, information, and social contact, we instinctively look for something or someone we resonate with; something that fits in our echo chambers. Today, this process happens even faster than we can blink (or think): it’s already curated for you by algorithms and AI.
The real issue is not some deep, dark corner of the internet where trolls feed off each other’s bile. Our echo chambers exist long before we fire up a computer or mobile gadget. The fake news outlets on the internet simply enhance and bring to the fore what is already there in us. So the solution is not in technology.
The indifference of companies like Facebook is appalling, yes. They should take steps like using algorithms and AI to weed out fake news content, yes, it might help. But this does not address the root of the problem.
We might want to consider how to convert our echo chambers to anechoic chambers.
An anechoic chamber, simply put, is a room built to eliminate reverberations as well as external sound. In the world of audio technology, anechoic chambers are used to test and measure the true amount of energy generated by audio products such as headphones and loudspeakers. They also make it possible to discern the quality of the sound put out by these equipment.
Of course, anechoic chambers are anything but natural. People have reported feeling unwell and experiencing nausea and even hallucinations after spending less than one hour in these contraptions. Thus turning our minds into analogous anechoic chambers sounds counter-intuitive — Aristotle would say only beasts and gods can have anechoic minds — but let’s run with the idea for a bit.
An anechoic mind is focused on one thing: to distill every idea, every piece of information, every bit of news until its quality is revealed — how much of it is fact, how much opinion, or if it is completely (nowadays, often intentionally ) erroneous. Skepticism is a golden rule, and reasonable doubt a silver one.
It gets tricky, though. The only way to fact- and opinion-check something is by referring to other sources of ideas and perspectives. But as we are free to pick the sources for comparison and checking, we could simply pick only those that support our preferred point of view or those that get their information and perspectives from the same source. Again, an echo chamber.
To further refine the idea of an anechoic mind, it’s not about shutting out opposing viewpoints and forming unilateral or asocial opinions. It’s about shutting out noise disguised as news that have no basis in fact.
It’s about detachment in the sense of stepping back to get a bigger picture. Getting caught up in ourselves distances us from the concerns and motivations of other groups of people in society.
It’s about journalists asking questions that matter, not fishing for ad clicks. It’s about people in positions of wealth and power keeping their peers in check. And ultimately, it’s about people making the effort to check themselves, to go beyond celebrity endorsements and election campaigns to think critically about what’s happening to them.
And like Virginia Woolf’s figurative room for women writers, an anechoic chamber of the mind is a daunting effort.
Originally published on Wordpress
