Echo Chambers

    Echo chambers affect us in everyday life and play a major role in social media platforms. The definition of an echo chamber is an environment where a person only receives information or opinions that reflect their own.

    This can cause major misinformation as well as make it more difficult for another person to see another perspective. When someone comes to you with a different opinion on a matter, it tends to be an argument. As humans, we have a tendency to not admit when we are wrong. When people disagree there are usually three different stages of assumptions. There is the ignorance assumption, the idiocy assumption, and the evil assumption. These are just ways for people to overall not open their minds to other people's opinions and stay in their little bubbles of information.

    Let's use a very easy example to get a better understanding of what exactly is being talked about. If one person only got their news from FOX and another only got their news from CNN and the topic at hand was gun violence, both people would get different types of information on the topic and would not know each other's perspective.
 

    It could affect society in a very negative way, more than positive to me at least. Echo Chambers can lead to people having a closed mind about society. What this could lead to is that people will stop thinking for themselves. Another thing is that this can limit the ability to solve problems. This outcome is never good because this will force people to rely on other people's opinions. This would probably be by people who hold government power or any type of power of some sort.

    I mean I guess you can say that a positive is that they are getting SOME type of information about the situation at hand. Another positive thing is that it could boost people's confidence levels. Most of the time people have a constant fear of being judged by someone who does not have the same opinion as them. Using echo chambers the people you share your opinions too will most likely have the same opinion and agree with you. In this case, you are less likely to be judged for sharing your opinion with everyone.

    The example used earlier would probably be targeted toward an older population, but what about younger people? You might think that this really would not affect young people due to them not really watching the news but it still does. There is a type of echo chamber called a filter bubble. A filter bubble is an algorithmic bias that limits the information an individual user sees on the internet. Many different social media platforms use algorithms in order to dictate what you see such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
 

    Echo chambers are best to be avoided at all costs. They are a way to limit people to think and receive information. A simple way to avoid echo chambers is to be open-minded and look at more than one media source.