There’s a ringing in your ears and dots begin to appear in front of your eyes: this is the experience of listening to someone who has spent their formative years in ‘echo chambers’. Like watching a jolly chimp smugly clanging its cymbals on an undeserved podium – infuriating, but impossible to ignore.
Spurred from the Internet Age, the term refers to how people consume digital content and ally with those who affirm their pre-existing beliefs. To some extent, this is not their fault. Our tech wardens have monetised humanity’s kryptonite. That is, we are lazy and we love to love ourselves. From this came ‘internet cookies’, endearingly named, to track our internet habits and personalise our online experience.
Not interested in this post, click, follow similar accounts, click, mute this user, click, show fewer posts like this, click. Alas, the perfect timeline for our insipid consumption. Every post we’re shown now is more or less a spin-off of all we have thought, and all we will ever think.
Echo chambers are not a modern phenomenon, though its omnipresence is definitely new. Like the internet, echo chambers used to be a place you could leave. It was a church or a university, your family dinners, or even the quaint little coffee shop no one seemed to know about. These days we sit in these very places glued to our phones, weighted by our chambers which now travel with us. It is inescapable. And because of this, we have pigeonholed ourselves and grown intolerant of others. Our choice of companions are like-minded, politically aligned (with us) and of course, morally righteous (like us).
Did we want friends or Yes-men?
As insecurity grows, so does vanity. The liberal conditions in which we live assert that everybody has a right to a different opinion. Ironically, this right is only realised if said opinion is validated. We have regressed. American Psychologist, Maslow, warned that true self-esteem is earned through respect from others not our own reverberations. It is absurd how under-socialised people have become; this newfound habit of assembling our social circles encourages tribalism and a narrowed worldview.
Our echo chambers might as well be cots where we sit in soiled nappies, collectively thrashing our legs and screaming. Manically virtue signalling and judging others.
Let’s not spend our lives like this, let’s not devolve.
Befriend conflict. Give it a home.
Break bread.
