Echo Chambers (Continued) - Musings and Meditations
- filipvk
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
Dear friends,
In the previous Musing, I talked about echo chambers, and I suggested that our entire society can be seen as a kind of echo chamber, in which dominant viewpoints and worldviews are constantly reflected and amplified, while divergent, dissident, or unusual viewpoints are underrepresented, suppressed, or silenced. Society as a whole is the echo chamber you don’t even realize you’re in.
That “overarching” echo chamber is largely rooted in the worldview that operates at a deeper level and underlies a society’s ideology and organization—a worldview that is much harder to perceive, let alone question. Precisely because of its ubiquity, it is difficult to even realize that it exists at all, and that worldview can exert a largely unconscious influence on just about everything we do, say, and think—or do not allow ourselves to think.
And in secularized industrial societies, that overarching worldview is, until further notice, what is called philosophical or scientific materialism.
I’ll come back to that, but in this musing I first wanted to point out how even the “smaller” echo chambers and information bubbles within that overarching worldview have a greater influence than is generally realized on the nature of the information that reaches you.
Some examples of very powerful “echo chambers within an echo chamber” include, in addition to the “usual suspects” of social media, just about all contemporary mainstream media: television, newspapers, and magazines. Furthermore, our educational institutions; political parties and ideological groups; community organizations; social movements; businesses and corporations; economic interest groups; universities; and, last but not least, our social circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. That last social echo chamber is perhaps the most influential of all—and may be the reason why systems thinker Jeremy Lent begins his masterful 'The Web of Meaning' with an imaginary conversation at a family gathering.
But let me limit myself for now to our mainstream media.
The first time I personally became aware of how our media also function as information bubbles and echo chambers was long before social media existed. Even the internet was still in its infancy, and personal computers still seemed like science fiction.
In the fall of 1990, I moved to the United States, where I would live, study, and work for four years. It quickly became clear that the image of the U.S. that we were presented with in Europe’s mainstream media at the time was very incomplete and biased. The platitudes and clichés we cherished in Europe about the people, the customs and traditions, and the nature of the country (actually, the continent) turned out almost immediately to be very much off the mark. Many things in my new environment resembled the image of the U.S. we were presented in Europe at the time, but a great deal was totally different, in a way that was initially slightly disorienting, precisely because of the mix of the very familiar and the very strange.
Conversely, it quickly became clear that the image of Europe portrayed in the American media was just as incomplete and biased. Certain aspects of European politics and society were almost never reported on, while others were covered in a very incomplete or selective manner. The Europe that existed in Americans’ minds seemed just as much a constructed and incomplete fiction as the image of the U.S. in Europe. And now that I’ve been following the media in both the U.S. and Europe for most of my life, I can say that this hasn’t essentially changed since the 1990s: if you follow only the media of your own home country, your view of another part of the world will be very, very limited. Much more limited than you might think.
That realization was quite an eye-opener, and one of the reasons why I believe as many people as possible should spend an extended period of time in another part of the world: it’s one of the best ways to shed at least some of the blinders and prejudices we all harbor, and thereby begin to see our own society much more clearly for what it is: an echo chamber, with a very limited and one-sided view of everything that lies outside that echo chamber. Ideally, that stay should last longer than a few weeks; a vacation trip is insufficient. At best, that offers a glimpse of the unfamiliar, but it’s not enough to truly step outside the safety of one’s own perspective. A few years seems better to me: that’s the time needed to truly let go of the security of one’s familiar worldview.
Not everyone has the means or the time to travel, let alone to live in another part of the world for an extended period. But one of the things we can do to break out of the echo chamber of our media and the image of the world they present to us is to diversify the media we follow, and to also follow media from other countries and continents. In the digital age, it’s easier than ever to follow media from other regions, and I’ll provide a list another time of international news outlets that I’d recommend.
Mainstream media are one of the cornerstones of a society’s echo chamber: radio, television, newspapers, and magazines still form an exceptionally dominant and pervasive framework that shapes our thinking and perception far more than we generally realize. And this isn’t just true of the distorted image they paint of other parts of the world: even our own country and society are portrayed through a very limited and biased lens. And the differences between these television stations or newspapers are less significant than you might think.
Virtually all mainstream media—whether left- or right-leaning, progressive or conservative—share certain assumptions and beliefs that we rarely question precisely because of this: it is because of their ubiquity that we come to take these assumptions for granted, as something no sensible person would question. And it is only through more than only sporadic exposure to ideas and perspectives that fall (far) outside of that framework that we can begin to see just how limited and biased the picture of the world—and of our own society—in our media really is. Just as I was only able to truly see how limited our view of the U.S. is after living in that country for a few years.
To start with, I’d like to invite you to undermine the power of our media’s echo chamber by spending less time in it.
That seems just as important to me as limiting your exposure to social media.
Watch less television, read fewer newspapers, listen less to the radio. Disconnect yourself—at least partially—from the never-ending stream of infotainment, noise, and attention-sucking bits and bytes that keep us glued to the screen like rabbits to a lightbulb.
Spend more time in nature, among trees and by rivers. Listen more closely to what comes through there, if you spend enough time there without distractions. I myself have kept my media exposure to a minimum for many decades, and I believe that’s one of the healthiest habits I’ve developed—certainly just as beneficial as meditation or regular physical exercise.
That conscious limitation can free up a tremendous amount of space for the information we need now more than ever: that which comes from our intuition, our heart, and that part of us that isn’t limited by any echo chamber. That part that is much larger and wiser than we usually realize.
And reducing your media exposure won’t make you any less informed—quite the opposite. You’ll be less hooked to the 24-hour news cycles with their constant focus on fear and violence, and you’ll be better able to see the forest for the trees: the information that really matters.
Next time, I’ll pick up where I left off last time: how these media echo chambers also have a major influence on our worldview in the broadest sense—what we believe, think, and even feel about existence, about the universe, about what we consider real, and what we deem possible or impossible. Because the influence of the media goes far beyond opinions on politics or prejudices about our society or about other countries. Also when it comes to worldviews, science, and philosophy—or, in other words, what we collectively believe at the deepest level about the world and ourselves—the limitations of our media are very pronounced and play a decisive role in shaping the unique echo chamber in which we all find ourselves. And yes, we need to step out of that echo chamber as much as possible and head out into the open air, where all the information we so desperately need right now can be found. It’s a journey well worth taking!
Thanks for reading, and until the next episode,
All the best to you,
Filip
