On Echo Chambers

tl;dr: There's been a lot of talk about echo chambers recently. I have perhaps a more charitable interpretation.

A common sentiment is that in the modern world, people are too stuck in their echo chambers. This is mostly used as an insult against the extremely online left wing, most recently a lot about Bluesky. Interestingly, the extremely online right wing doesn't get the same accusation as much, even though they're steeped in much more extreme networks. But that's an immediate tangent.

The Bad Faith Version

Many of the people talking about this are doing so in bad faith. They seem to mean that for some reason those with more left political leanings are obligated to give all of their time, money, and data to a far-right billionaire and his network that has been actively suppressing them and sending harassment at them for years. Let's be clear that's bad. You have a right to block somebody who walks in to your social feeds and starts hurling abuse at you or at anyone else, just as much as you have a right to kick out somebody who tries to walk into living room and commit the same abuses in person.

Even more to the point, some people absolutely should be blocked because they are often actively trying to drive engagement through anger, which benefits them, including sometimes financially. Don't try to dunk on them first. Just take away their precious engagement and let them shout into the void. Make it less profitable to be spreading hate and maybe some of them will even learn to stop spreading hate.

Furthermore, am extremist billionaire does not have the right to demand that more people buy ads from him or use his network just because he wants them to. We are under no such obligation to make him even richer. We are under no such obligation to support his false claims that he has turned X into the beacon of free speech.

But there have been plenty of responses already on the Internet pointing out things like this.

The Good Faith Version

Where this gets more interesting is that I'm not convinced that's what everybody means when they criticize echo chambers. I believe some do have a more good faith desire behind the complaint, even if they aren't explaining it in quite the way I am about to.

A lot of the complaints say they want to restore respectful dialogue with people we don't agree with everything about. On its surface, that is a good goal.

Unfortunately that is not what social media is built to be. It is not designed to have that respectful deep dialogue. Messages are short, struggling to find space for nuance. They are mostly one-directional; one of the interesting changes years ago was shifting from social networking to social media. Networking implies some equality and finding your peers. Media implies there are some creators and the rest are consumers. That's a dynamic that is very hard to have real hard conversation within. Social media may occasionally be able to put a bandaid on loneliness, but it isn't a replacement for real community.

So I think the good faith interpretation here is that people are realizing that social media is not a replacement for real community and they want that real community again. Where they make a mistake is thinking the way to get it again is by forcing everyone to be on a particular toxic site.

The Emerging Church and Dialogue

Let's get this back to the realm of Christianity. I recently listened through the Emerged series from Homebrewed Christianity, looking back on the emerging church movement. This was a big movement for my own life, although I was not tied to any official part of that movement and was largely at the end of it. But something that came up a lot resonated with my experience: it was largely based in friendship. You could have extensive tough conversations with people completely different than you, sometimes coming to very different conclusions, because of a friendship that came from wrestling with the same questions over time. In the earliest days, that was in small meetup groups you would find online, and show up without any idea of who else would be there. You might show up and see an evangelical youth pastor hoping nobody from his church sees him, and a 16 year old Episcopalian contemplating faith for the first time, and a 70 year old Eastern Orthodox priest who wants to learn more about younger generations.

Later, closer to my time, a lot of these conversations happened in blogs. We found our 20 or 30 blogs that we loved, loaded them in our Google Reader (which no longer exists but RSS still does), and we would have long and tough conversations with a lot of the same people over months and years in the comments or through writing our own blog posts.

Those largely faded out as social media took over, which gets us back to the problems I named earlier. There are some places somewhat modelling those ideas of dialogue in longer deeper discussions with those you don't fully agree with, like the New Leaf Network here in Canada, but the large scale movement is no more.

What Now?

So what do we do about that? Personally, I think trying to change the nature of social media is swimming upstream. You might occasionally manage to foster some real respectful conversation with somebody you disagree with. But it's hard because the medium fundamentally opposes it. It's even harder when there's a profit motive for the rich people controlling the social media to maximum their profits at the expense of everything else, which largely means optimizing engagement through rage and blocking links out to reliable sources.

We could try to go back to blogs, if we're going to focus on tech. Hey look, I'm sort of doing that, but without comments - less because I don't want dialogue and more because I don't want to pay for and maintain a server. But I suspect it's still too close to social media for most people to be able to change their default ways of thinking, so many now will still walk into the comments ready to pick a fight, not form a community over the next decade.

So this is where I sound old-fashioned: churches need to be building real community, in person or online small groups. And they need to be inviting others into that real community. That real community takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of patience with each other, it takes a willingness to confess when we've hurt each other and lot of forgiveness when we do mess up. It also takes intentional infrastructure: where can they meet in a place that is reachable, which is not a given in North America's sprawling urban design? What time, when so many people have no time left at the end of a workday to commit to something else? Those don't have easy answers. But if we aren't even trying, our social problems are only to get worse.