Blog 3: The Echo Chamber and its impact on how people consume Social Media

: Photo Credit: Caitlinym88

Hello everyone, and welcome to my third blog post, this week I will be talking about “The Echo Chamber and its impact on how people consume media”

Echo Chamber

Firstly for those of you whom may not of hear of the term before“ Echo chamber” In media today “an Echo Chamber is a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an “enclosed” system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed or otherwise underrepresented”

Brexit

I am going to use “Brexit” as an example to describe the Echo Chamber, as this summer just gone, that is what engulfed my Facebook/twitter news feed.

To begin I would ask people take a good look at your news feed, what do you see? Unfortunately, with the last thousands of years and more fears of inequality, immigration and the establishment were all there, just not on a social media platform for the entire world to see.

Facebook Analytics

But, nowadays with the use of Facebook analytics by liking and sharing certain ideas interest Facebook will only begin to show you what you like and begin to disregard the opinions of others create an almost unrealistic social media bubble for ourselves.
For example, during the time of Brexit, How many times did you see people support leave in your news feed? By filtering it out, we became even more divided. Our Facebook feeds polarised the debate. When the vote had passed, Protests ensued and the majority of people were shocked with what had happened? After the result I did a lot of searched online through facebook/twitter to give me a better insight to what had just happened (Similar to the USA elections, I imagine polls in the near future will be never believed again.) Back to my point, I assumed everybody I knew was as shocked as I was.

Facebook saw what I “liked”, built a profile for me and kept serving up what I wanted to see. This algorithm is what makes Facebook the addictive monster it is. Brilliant for keeping me in the loop with my interests, disastrous when it comes to politics. (An idea algorithm for business online today, we see less from our friends and more from business we engage with.)

I had to work hard to unearth my long lost friends from school, College and travelling aboard for a year on Facebook who had decided to vote Leave. If I saw their posts, I wouldn’t have tried to change them, but I would have the chance to relate. Why should an algorithm filter out the real views of people I care about? Instead of an active debate, we were stuck in our own echo-chambers, sharing the same point of view, liking it and thinking the job was done.

Social Media Bubble

Last week we were given the fantastic opportunity to have a live Q&A session in Corks Institute of technology with Caleb Gardner organised by Zahid Aslam.

Caleb spoke on how different media outlets overall influence our perception on a given topic.

He raised some interesting points such in relation to echo chamber, Caleb told us how he is a big believer in how the universe creates similar patterns witch relate to similar macro and micro levels within physics for example if you zoom in to a leaf on a tree it creates a very similar patterns like a forest, this is what the universe does. Now, if we were to extract to human behavior Caleb said, people being civil to each other one to one has a lot of insight how we can be civil online. One to millions or millions to millions. We have to find good ways to create good dialogue online.