Joho the Blog
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Your thoughts about echo chambers are an important contribution to the discussion. While I don't disagree with you, I'd point out that the concept is only pejorative in a similar manner to the word "clique." If you're in it, everything's cool. If you're not, then you argue its unworthiness.

Is the Internet a giant echo chamber? Yes and no. Are there sites/groups within the whole that are echo chambers? Well of course. As a writer, I find the term useful and descriptive, but I recognize that it's all in the mind of the perceiver. And, like other pejorative terms, it's politically correct to use them if you're a part of the group and not if you aren't.

And so it goes...

That's a good point, I don't expect BloggerCon will spend much time debating whether weblogs are valuable or not, in the same way that a San Jose Mercury-News weblog wouldn't debate whether San Jose is valuable or not. We take some things as a given.

But the term "echo chamber" very nicely summarizes my critique of the Dean weblog. There was no room for a person such as myself who wanted to use their weblog to get a sense of what the candidate was about, or what the campaign was like (I mean really like). The Dean blog was more like sales force training materials, which is okay, but very echo-chamberish, and not useful for what the Web might be asked to do -- to support voters.

I'm glad you're going to be at BloggerCon. Do you have ideas for sessions? I have a grid to fill! ;->

I don't know if I understand the "echo chamber" analogy--it sometimes sounds like people are just waving around the symbol "echo chamber" like everyone knows exactly what that means!

But, I was wondering whether we are all so (e.g., biologically / psychologically) used to grouping in a physically local sense, that, at least when enough of us "get together" repeatedly online, we naturally tend to introduce local physical constraints into virtual groupings.

So, given enough identifiable inter-group contact, we do the "urban tribe" thing (by which, I mean, we spend a significant amount of our time together ritually defining the boundaries of our tribes).

http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/002029.html

Echo Chamber
The Internet is a great validation device.

My daughter, for instance, loves the Harry Potter characters. She wants to read about them all the time. On fanfiction.net she can, in stories written by people her own age, with her sensibility. She doesn't have to wait for Book 6 to come out. And her feelings are validated, because the authors of those stories feel the same way she does.

Grown-ups have the same kind of experience.

I'm just coming up from an extended period in the Howard Dean echo chamber. Anyone who criticized was an idiot, a troll, a tool. Anyone who said "attaboy" was loved, and I was loved when I said it, too.

There are all sorts of echo chambers. Commenter Alan Bacon lives in one, one that is quite different from mine. Anyone advocating gun control is out to exterminate people, banks are scams, laws are tools of oppression to be gotten-around with fancy language.

To me, it's a strange world indeed. Yet there are many, many people who believe as Alan does. He may have more rabid fans than I do. My guess is he does.

Now a lot of people are predicting, based on all this, that the Internet Age is dangerous to democracy, that it will take our system down.

Fortunately I majored in history. This is simply not so. In fact, the low publishing costs of today's Internet existed throughout most of the 19th century, and echo chambers abounded. If you lived in the Antebellum South you lived in an echo chamber. If you lived in a northern Irish community you lived in an echo chamber. If you lived in a Jewish ghetto you lived in an echo chamber. If you lived in abolitionist Boston you lived in an echo chamber. If you lived on a Minnesota farm you lived in an echo chamber. And none of these echo chambers could communicate with the others -- there was no language through which they could reach understanding.

Bad example, you say. Bloody Civil War, you say. That's true. But despite all the horrors of that time the echo chambers survived intact, others were created, and the nation went on. Elections were held, some of them close and some not so close. The power of money, faith, and ethnicity rose or fell, despite the echo chambers.

The echo chambers didn't really fade until lithography created the mass market, near the turn of the last century. Then the market caused tastes to be homogenized, Americanized, while those in echo chambers became objects of pity. In that way a larger echo chamber, that of the nation, one borne of technology, smashed the older chambers nearly entirely.

But echo chambers, in the end, are irrelevant. They offer only the illusion of power, they are in fact illusions. Comfortable illusions, true, but illusions nonetheless. And when actions are taken based solely on what you hear in an echo chamber, know this now -- you are acting under a delusion.

I know. President Dean speaks to it.

What, precisely, is so bad about echo chambers? How is the Dean blog experience any different than the liberals who only read The Nation and the Progressive, etc. and the conservatives who only read National Review, etc., long before there was an Internet?

Mass movements, almost by definition, require this sort of effect. Movements that engage in excessive self-criticism die.

Is this just the general question: what can we do to embrace what we would otherwise tend to avoid or be isolated from?

How do we get beyond the ([?post-]modern version of) our provincialism?

> Is this just the general question: what can we
> do to embrace what we would otherwise tend to
> avoid or be isolated from?

Good question. There seem few good answers beyond the standard one: Exposure--at whatever levels we are capable of negotiating at any given moment.

> "How do we get beyond the ([?post-]modern
> version of) our provincialism?"

Perhaps we don't. Perhaps we forever live as "poor existing individuals" (Kierkegaard) hoping for enough humility to evolve when the rough edges of our provincialism meet those of another.

I am a provincialist. My trans-culture childhood has contributed to an outlook that privileges certain rhymes of life; certain expectations of hospitality, of justice; a certain cadence of social engagement. These expectations on my part, while very different from some traditional definitions of village provincialism are no less idiosyncratic.

Just as I am unable to locate a position from which to see with objectivity, so I am without the experience to live without provincialism.

My one word definition of postmodernity is humility. To me, the recognition of contingency seems appropriately lived out in a stance of courageous humility. Perhaps this is one area that distinguishes my postmodern provincialism from the provincialism of my ancestors: that the large projects of Truth, Objectivity and Civilization have been exchanged for the open projects of internetworked knowledge, living and co-existence.

Many Deaniacs are uncomfortable talking about echo chamber blogs, not just Weinberger, for very obvious reasons. The Dean Campaign positioned itself as a different kind of campaign, one in which the voters and supporters had some actual input into campaign decision-making. This implies an interactive vehicle for taking and responding to feedback, and a general openness to it.

Some feedback is critical, and this is (one of many places) where the Dean Campaign failed to live up to it's promises to The People. Critical comments left on Blog for America were deleted by campaign censors, and not heeded by the campaign. One example: when Dean was guest-blogging on Lessig, I posted some comments on both sites, only to have the Deaniac censors delete them. There was a fuss, and some of by comments were restored.

But the censorship policy continued, and the Dean Campaign found itself out-of-touch with real people who hadn't drunk the Deaniac Kool-Aid. And we know what happened next.

So rather than pretend that the Deaniac Echo Chamber wasn't both real and destructive, thoughtful people want to talk about it.

Will this discussion be censored too?

"I know. President Dean speaks to it."

I didn't understand this part, at all.

?

Dan, to your endorsement of humility I'd only add a wet kiss on the check of ambiguity. "To be moral is to be ambivalent" is my motto.

It's a Power Law... I think what we're seeing as an "Echo Chamber" is actually just the inevitable self-reinforcement of the top 10%. So the question becomes how to locate and reinforce the nuggets of truth in the 90-50% middle and the long tail below 50% To quote Matt Jones, "the tail is important too".

http://www.emptybottle.org/glass/2004/02/echo_and_the_bunnymen.php

Richard Bennett has a good point about the Dean blog but ends with a contradiction. I read the first part as calling for better editorial control, yet he ends claiming that there is censorship. Aren't censorship and editorial control the same? I think Dean blog failed from poor editorial (read message) control. I think the feedback was there but not processed.

Blogs are very good at reinforcing whatever it is that ties a particular community together. They are not so good at reaching out beyond their natural community. That's the nature of the medium: most bloggers are interested in sharing their point of view, not selling it.

The Dean blog performed (and continues to perfom) the community building function very well. It was not, IMO, intended to sell Dean's point of view. That's what the extensive "Issues" section of the site was for. Nor was it intended to collect input from the readership, though it did sometimes serve that function. Email and the site forums were (and are) much more effective means of information gathering and substantive debate.

Part of the echo chamber effect that I see in many blogs is the idea that a blog can solve all of a large organization's communications needs. It ain't so.

But Mr. Winer, couldn't one, anyone, consider you to be shouting loudest into the echo chamber?

What would happen if you did kill that which seems to feed you?

David, humility and ambiguity it is--the makings of a fascinating, internetwork of provincialisms.

I've been chewing on the echo chamber bit and i posted a critique on different parts of it: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/02/23/echochambers_and_homophily.html

If you have time, i'd really love your thoughts on the bits that bugged me. I really agree with you that it's a problematic conceptualization, but i think that it's rooted in something valid and i'm trying to tease that out.

David

I think your word-pirating the term Echo Chamber. I blogged some more thoughts here http://keeptrying.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_keeptrying_archive.html#107773326994288859

People should read your post, Mike, but I don't think I'm word pirating the phrase "echo chamber." My Salon piece defines it in a way that I think is agreeable to those who use the phrase. I'm saying that the phenomena labeled "echo chambers" don't really match the definition. I also argue that the concept as defined by its users actually doesn't make much sense.

A roughly analogous form of argument (simply as an example...ignore the actual content): The "piracy" meme says that those who download copyrighted music without paying for it are pirates. [That's intended to be a definition acceptable to those who use the piracy meme.] But those to whom the term is applied aren't actually doing what the meme says, and here's why... [fill in the blank]. Further, the entire piracy meme makes assumptions that don't hold water; here's why...[another blank to fill in].

To be a word pirate, I'd have to deliberately misuse "echo chamber" for political or commercial gain. My argument with the term may be full of crap, but I'm not word pirating it.

"I also argue that the concept as defined by its users actually doesn't make much sense."

Then possibly you are not understanding what phenomena they are defining - some pretty smart people have used the term.

What did you think about this definition:
An Echo Chamber is a group that ignores other opinions to their own detriment.

Also do you agree with Kling's thesis that there is a popular school of thought that holds that changing people's minds is not a primary goal of public discussion?

second BloggerCon - very interesting ibformation. Thank you.