Editorial: Creating your own echo-chamber
Our choices and surroundings influence our perspectives and potentially limit our understanding
March 4, 2016
Would you consider rooting for an athlete who is disliked by your friends and by the Facebook pages you follow?
How likely are you to follow a politician who supports the Syrian refugees in America when your preferred news sites frequently run headlines concerning refugee violence?
Do you civilly converse with someone who takes the “wrong” side on major issues like gun control, religion, same-sex marriage, abortion and education?
Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Feb. 13 in Texas created a social media uproar. Mainstream news sites, political pundits, presidential candidates and many more commented on the late judge’s “hardcore” conservative views. Facebook feeds across America mirrored the national polarity, either lamenting the loss of a key conservative voice on the Supreme Court or eviscerating the late justice’s positions.
Yet Scalia was not simply a hardliner. Over the years, he had formed a well-known but little-understood friendship with the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, suggesting that, though the two often butted heads on the bench, they nonetheless took the time to understand each other’s views and maintain an (albeit unlikely) friendship.
And just as these Justices crafted different opinions on the topics they encountered, we formulate opinions on the things we find online. Our online presence influences our views, but it can also limit our understanding of issues as a whole if we refuse to glance beyond our feeds and consider the other side.
Facebook studies your behavior to determine what goes into your feed. Click a link, unfollow a page, make a comment or even ignore a post entirely, the company’s algorithms associate you, the user, with the content with which you interacted. In fact, many other social media companies, such as Twitter and Instagram, also allow users to personalize their feeds.
The result? We actively surround ourselves with the things that we want to see.
In combination with our daily interactions with neighbors, friends and books, this digital world may blind us to other perspectives.
The problem arises when we quickly choose selective viewpoints to a controversy while blinded by the cocoon we create out of, say, the channels we subscribe to on YouTube and the pages we like on Facebook.
Too often, the conversation turns into personal attacks on the people supporting the other side. If such two diametrically opposed legal scholars could understand each other before forming their perspectives, so can we.
This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on Mar. 2, 2016.