Echo Chambers and Their Potential Dangers

Harry Lan Staff Writer

It feels nice for someone to agree with you. As social animals, we get some sense of nice feelings when this happens to us.

However, having too much of one thing will almost always turn out to be a bad thing. Such a case is having an overabundance of people that agree with each other and reject criticism, otherwise known as an echo chamber.

Echo chambers isn’t a literal term, but rather one used to describe an environment where people will continuously regurgitate the same opinion or opinions with each other. This has been normalized on the internet as its extensive reach allows echo chambers to form much easier as similar people gravitate to similar topics. Phrased this way, it sort of sounds like just another group. However, it is not.

To identify a place as a healthy community one must find a situation where the people within the community work to build it up, to encourage communication.

On the other hand, in a community that is an echo chamber, one finds a space that is detrimental to communication and new things.

Echo chambers can easily lead people to believe misleading or false information, as they will stop questioning things because they have come to trust those in a leading position within the group. Also, their alliance within this type of group gives them more leniency; and if no one questions it, they may come to believe almost anything and even spread it.

What I’m saying is that: it is somewhat hard to notice an echo chamber from the inside of it, and you should take care to observe before joining any group.

I do have personal experience with being a group that I feel represented an echo chamber and the rather close-mindedness that came with it. As such, I urge you to check the current groups you are a part of and, perhaps, cut yourself off from any that reveal themselves to be this way before you come to be completely subservient to them.