In the echo chamber

While we're all intellectually aware of the echo chamber effect on social media, I've recently had a personalised demonstration of how thorough it can be.

When I was recently declared an unperson by Twitter, I re-upped as @gerrygaffneyffs but didn’t make much of an attempt to reinstate my previous connections. Instead, I browsed commentary on items of interest.

Within around a couple of hours of usage over a few days I found myself encased in a comfortable cocoon of like-minded people. It was a powerful demonstration of the fact that the world view available to me on social media is so strongly curated by algorithms. Somehow it seemed even more insidious than the blinkered view that had taken several years to accrete on my previous profile.

It reminded me of a conversation with Dave Gray back in 2016 on UXpod, when he said:

'We’re all walking around with this bubble of belief … that we’ve formulated over time. One of the only ways you’re going to get out of that bubble is to [subscribe to] channels or categories of things that you know in advance are going to challenge you.'

It’s probably easier to be open to these alternative or challenging channels in the real world. We meet people with whom we disagree, or we open a print journal or newspaper containing views that contradict our own.

On social media and in the metaverse, we can quickly come to feel that those alternative views simply don’t exist.