On "Echo Chambers"

wrath
24

I think it’s all a matter of perception. I myself don’t spend a lot of time reading the “Hey Rube!” and “Usual trollies” threads in the Lounge anymore because I started getting this uncomfortable feeling every now and then that sometimes a temptation would arise to flag a post because of what someone was saying (that is: an unpopular viewpoint or perspective, not an actionable or abusive post under my understanding of the TOS), and that kinda bugged me. I mean, there are going to be opinions that, however politely framed and presented, are simply going to be too offensive or too inflammatory to be allowed, whether it’s a tired old defense of the Dixiecrats that has been debunked a zillion times before, or an altogether novel theory of why X-type of person is simply fundamentally smarter/stronger/sexier/more morally sound than Z-type. So we typically don’t allow overt racism or sexism, nor do we tolerate victim-blaming or any number of malevolent-but-technically-polite forms of sealioning. And when we find a consensus of voices who are united against such evils, the temptation can arise to expand the frontiers of that consensus, even subconsciously, to a point where we think that there are enough of us Upstanding Community Members here opposed to Xism that we gotta start flagging all Xists, whether or not they’ve actually done anything that genuinely warrants flagging according to actual (not perceived) community standards.

I don’t trust my instincts enough to think I’m always going to know what’s best for the community, so I leave the policing to others. If I see egregious spam, I’ll flag it. Otherwise I’ll ignore it. I think there are enough Contrarians In Good Faith here to keep BBS from becoming an echo chamber, and I’m good with that. Still, I’m reluctant to join a posse unless it’s very clear that we’re fighting against something actually worth fighting. Controversy in and of itself is not evil, and is in fact useful for making sure we’re actually playing for the right side.

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25

I walked into that one, that’s on me. It’s my fault for not being extremely rigorous with what I’m saying, and allowing you the technical wiggle room to provide a single counterexample. At some point though, you are going to have to admit you are slicing wedge of the topics at hand and declaring BBS as an echo chamber.

There was a lot of anti-Trump jokes, disgust at his words, etc. but there was (dating back to the primary season) many articles about understanding why people were going to vote Trump and there was definitely not a unified response. The closest to a unified voice there was would be behind Bernie Sanders, because it sure as hell wasn’t behind the Democrats.

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I dunno. Perhaps I have a somewhat unique perspective, combined with a certain resistance or immunity to peer pressure, that gives me a willingness to hear and discuss things that others prefer to flag out of existence.

OK, I will admit that. There are many issues where there is a nice wide range of opinion and dissent is treated with respect. Fair cop, guv’nor!   But there are also issues where there is favoritism to varying degrees (dissent is permitted if extremely polite and carefully phrased, but agreement can be vulgar to the extreme) and we all know of at least one issue where only a very few dissenting voices are respected, and that’s basically because they won’t take any extreme positions without extensive research and evidentiary linking that anyone echoing the consensus would not require.

I don’t believe that BBS is truly and unequivocally an “echo chamber”. But I do see people and trends (@Donald_Petersen touched on this) that want to make it one, and as @OtherMichael pointed out it’s not a welcoming place for divergent views on several topics. I’ve seen more than a few witch-hunters and target-seekers looking for someone to beat on.

This place used to be a lot weirder. We had more polys and furries and makers and sun-worshippers and crop-circle types back in the day, and fewer angry people. We seem to be shrinking the lens or something, if that metaphor makes any sense.

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27

I wasn’t so very sensitive to this kind of stuff before I married into my wife’s family and got to learn more about the Hollywood Blacklist. The larger point wasn’t so much about Communism per se, but more about the fact that certain political opinions and philosophies were deemed so dangerous and reprehensible that people who were even suspected of holding them were blacklisted from work for over a decade, and this was deemed socially acceptable.

Just for giggles, let’s take a look at the Waldorf Statement, which formally began the blacklist sixty-nine years ago:

Members of the Association of Motion Picture Producers deplore the action of the 10 Hollywood men who have been cited for contempt by the House of Representatives. We do not desire to prejudge their legal rights, but their actions have been a disservice to their employers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.

We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the 10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.

On the broader issue of alleged subversive and disloyal elements in Hollywood, our members are likewise prepared to take positive action.

We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.

In pursuing this policy, we are not going to be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source. We are frank to recognize that such a policy involves danger and risks. There is the danger of hurting innocent people. There is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. Creative work at its best cannot be carried on in an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.

To this end we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives: to protect the innocent; and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever threatened.

The absence of a national policy, established by Congress, with respect to the employment of Communists in private industry makes our task difficult. Ours is a nation of laws. We request Congress to enact legislation to assist American industry to rid itself of subversive, disloyal elements.

Nothing subversive or un-American has appeared on the screen, nor can any number of Hollywood investigations obscure the patriotic services of the 30,000 loyal Americans employed in Hollywood who have given our government invaluable aid to war and peace.

Does this attitude sound at all familiar, particularly in recent years regarding Muslims and undocumented immigrants rather than Communists?

It’s all too easy for widespread consensus to devolve into something like an “echo chamber.” I don’t think we’re near that point, to be sure, but it’s always something to keep an eye on.

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29

That is the most echo chambery comment I’ve seen all day. To say that so long as the BBS isn’t as bad as North fricking Korea that any suggestion that it has elements of an echo chamber is offensive pretty much proves @Medievalist point. Your post is self-refuting.

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[quote=“Medievalist, post:26, topic:92249”]
This place used to be a lot weirder. We had more polys and furries and makers and sun-worshippers and crop-circle types back in the day, and fewer angry people. We seem to be shrinking the lens or something, if that metaphor makes any sense
[/quote]I can’t say why they left, but I will say angry people (on every side) have been whipped up by the same inflammatory individuals and Insuspect some of the people previously obsessed with a weird and specific hobby have not been as focused as in previous years. I guess I just doubt they have been driven out because of an echo chamber, but obviously I don’t have actual data on that. I feel like there are just a lot more angry people that previously were not, because there has been a massive rise in authoritarian politics and divisive media in the entire Western Hemisphere - and it is unavoidable.

I can tell you that I am not weird in any way in paper, but have been visiting the site for 8 years(ish), but I have had as many as two furries in my D&D group at once (three total) and definitely didn’t chase them away from BBS myself.

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32

Don’t blame me, I voted for @beschizza.

(he said he was going to keep us safe).

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33

Each other.

eachothereachothereachothereachother

We develop a consensus among ourselves, then that consensus gets challenged. On good days, it’s challenged well, and we meet the challenge well.

On other days…

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35

Authoritarian dipshits. And they don’t handle dissent within their ranks too well, I’d bet - but there’s no shorthand term for it AFAIK.

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36

Why is the right so good at coming up with names that sting? Like Bush Sr. citing Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and it made it seem like it was a bad thing. As if civil liberties were something embarrassing.

I suppose the rest of us have ruined the word “nazi.” Or did they do that themselves?

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They did. I saw a picture once explaining what they call themselves. They’re very sensitive to what they are called in their safe spaces.

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Simple - they’re arseholes.

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39

Public forums can’t be “safe spaces” to begin with. There is no application or approval committee here, no ideological purity test, etc.

I did use the term echo chamber in the recent threads about the BBS, but did so in the sense that I believe that there is in fact value in seeing other ideas. I guess I’m a fundamentalist about Liberalism that way.

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Ideologies of all types have a tendency to fracture into factions, all claiming to be the true ideal. That is to say echo chambers have a tendency to shrink in on themselves.

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Hey, I resemble that remark!

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42

I think the whole echo chamber / not an echo chamber thing is going nowhere. Unless we can define echo chamber or agree upon an echo chamber test, I think the term is just getting in the way of discussing what people are actually concerned about.

Based on people’s arguments that this place is or is not an echo chamber, I’ve put together the following list of issues:

  1. Posts being banned because other people don’t agree with the poster
  • Concern about the bar that a comment has to pass to be flag-worthy
  • Change in boingboing’s tone away from weird stuff and towards anger
  • People criticizing people rather than what those people are saying
  • Lounge threads that allow regulars to collude in singling people out for having different opinions

I don’t think (1) is actually happening on any significant scale. I say that because I’ve read lots of controversial topics and seen a very wide range of opinions. Also in the tread discussing reasons for flagging, @codinghorror indicated that there is no evidence to suggest this is happening. (N.B. That’s from a position with privileged access to information about flagging) I understand if people are still concerned about this, but I just think it’s empirically wrong and I’d need to hear an empirical argument to be convinced, acknowledging that I don’t even know what that would look like without access to information we don’t have.

The post about flagging out opinions has it’s own entire topic. Apparently we, as a community, don’t actually flag all that much to the point that people are discussing why we don’t flag. The overlap between that topic and this one is large. So I think (2) is discussed there, and the discussion shows a very high level of tolerance for shit and a lot of concern about flagging being used to widely.

For (3) I can understand that concern but I only know the BBS that I know. I’ve seen some very interesting user-created threads on a number of “weird” topics, so I don’t think that’s gone totally, but I’ll take on faith that this has diminished. Still, I wonder if that has more to do with the main site than the BBS community. If you want to find out about the BBS furry community, I don’t see how that’s going to happen if the main site isn’t posting about furries. I think we might be weirder than we normally discuss, and I’ve made a topic as an explicit echo chamber of positivity about weirdness in order to explore that: The Flying of the Freak Flags

(4) is a terrible habit. Should we be calling that out more, regardless of who is doing it an what the topic is? Posting more to say, “Hey, I feel like you are veering away from talking about ideas and actions and into judging about the person you are arguing with.” I think we all have the potential to do this, so maybe we need more reminders? (Or would that turn us into an echo chamber of respecting one another?!?)

(5) I was a regular for a little while. To get it I gamed the system a bit (opened threads I wasn’t interested in and held down j until I hit the bottom). I got mad at the BBS and left for two months and I feel better not being a regular. I don’t have a lot of perspective on what goes on in that thread. Do people feel the existence of a lounge for regulars is a problem in itself?

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45

If I give examples, will you say they are not echoing because they are self-evidently true? Because, with all due respect and I mean that sincerely,* I haven’t got time for that non-conversation. Epistemology has little or nothing to do with this.

No, most definitely not. I have occasionally theorized that Mark posts less because he gets periodically savaged for not using the proper memes - but I cannot speak for @frauenfelder so that’s merely my own (perhaps false) impression.

Yes, and as I noted in the thread itself, I think you had a valid and admirable reason for doing so. But I stopped visiting because - in my opinion - the non-stop Trumpathon that BB was running was actively helpful to Trump’s campaign. The person who gets their name repeated the most is the person who gets elected, generally, in anything resembling a democracy. Remember how happy I was when Rob posted an attack on Jill Stein? It was gross misrepresentation and mischaracterization and I loved him for it! Because I know for a fact that people who had never heard of her candidacy got their first inkling of her existence from that attack piece. But I don’t want to divert the topic into that discussion, either!**

Despite your reason for creating the thread, and the usefully informative posts you put in it, the last time I checked it was mostly composed of repetitive virtue signalling by people who wanted to declare their tribal affiliation and be visible among Trump’s opponents. Echo, echo echo echo echo was what it looked like to me then.

* Seriously, I respect your person and views, and I regret that in order to express our friendly disagreement I’ve had to say things that might appear inimical or disrespectful to you personally.

** Especially since I got flagged, personally insulted, and PMed for saying that BB’s coverage of Trump helped elect him. That was a definite echo chamber moment.

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The Trump thread got the most traction, probably, but Clinton, Sanders, Stein and even Johnson had ones too. We did try…

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47

I don’t think it’s about language policing, though. For me this has morphed into recognizing that I don’t think the term is useful because the people saying there is an echo chamber appear to be pointing to some sort of actual problem, while all I can do is look at my point (1) and say, “Nope, not true.”

And I think the term shuts my thinking down a bit. It just reminds me of the time that I re-read over 200 posts to categorize them and figured out that the majority of posters and the majority of comments were in support of the view that the echo-chamber-accuser said that BB was an echo chamber against.

I’m on a real push away from jargon because I think it’s unhelpful in conversations. I’d like it if instead of saying that the boards are/have become/are becoming an “echo chamber” people could say something like “I think we shout down first time posters too much” (an item not on my list above but that I can recall seeing in other discussions). Then we’d know what we were talking about.

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Well to be fair the Trump campaign was both a train wreck and freak show so it was hard to not pay attention.

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