John Milton and the Echo Chamber

Paradise Lost by John Milton is up there with the greatest poems ever written in the English Language. A Biblical epic charting the fall of man across 12 books, he published it in 1667 after dictating every word, as he was completely blind by then.

But here's the thing... Although Milton was a devout Christian, Paradise Lost's many astonishing sections, fizzing with poetic and dramatic tension, all tend to involve Satan at work rather than God and the Angels. The books that focus on God are bland. it's as if the very consideration of evil injected tempo into his thoughts, quickening his pulse and tightening his poetic genius.

Fast forward 450 years and consider the somewhat lesser literary skills at play within Twitter and Facebook... and indeed the media in general.

During a time of COVID-19 and Donald Trump's own fall of man currently at play, the foaming intensity of social and traditional media battles worldwide has never been higher or more worrying. The combatants threading and posting it out against each other appear to grow increasingly polarised, increasingly vicious and lacking in any modicum of mutual regard.

There are two important questions here: Is the world really so deeply scary and polarised as it appears? And, if not, why does it appear so?

The answer to the first is 'probably not'. The answer to the second is a combination of the Milton effect I describe above and optimisation algorithms built into social media. This is what causes the unsettling saturation of our mental biscuits every time we dunk them into social media

We are drawn to bad news for evolutionary reasons. The best adaptive evolutionary strategy is to react to threat more strongly than to benign conditions. Threats trigger fight and flight systems in the brain and adrenal system, releasing adrenaline and cortisol, feeding blood to our smooth muscles and away from our pre-frontal cortex. If you see a crowd of people looking at something, you look too... because failure to do so could mean that the threat they are watching carefully takes you unawares.

On Twitter and Facebook, the threads and posts we just can't help being drawn to are those that our evolutionary instincts perceive as communicating threat, injustice, outrage... all the powerful pieces on the emotional chessboard. But as we click on these tweets and posts, we also interact with optimisation algorithms that have been designed to keep us absorbing likeminded news, posts and tweets in order to provide the numbers that underpin advertising revenue (and therefore profit and therefore shareholder returns... ). We effectively reinforce the likelihood that the very platforms we engage with will feed us 'more of the same'.

'More of the same' creates the echo chamber and within that chamber, we are hand fed constantly from a bucket labelled 'Confirmation Bias'. Rarely are we exposed to counter argument or balance. That's not how optimisation works. It works by feeding us the world view we're familiar with. And this familiarity doesn't breed contempt: it breeds normation. What we see insidiously, inevitably becomes part of our world view. Believe me, I know... my parents used to read the Daily Mail until I transitioned them onto the Methodone of the Daily Telegraph!

We are tribe animals and social media will feed us the diet that our political or social tribe prefers. In the process, our views risk becoming more deeply entrenched and more radically polarised because challenge is less comfortable than reassuring confirmation.

Search for 'why the world is flat' and it's possible to go off for hours on threads that provide cherry picked confirmations of why it is indeed flat. The more flat-earthers search for proof, the less they will see counter-arguments because engagement on social media is about keeping you safe in your tribe. Each hyperlink takes us deeper into Confirmation Country. Add in the Milton effect, where the most dramatic and alarming reading is the most engaging and there you have it: a cocktail for polarisation.

Some years ago, I listened to the wonderful Brian Eno on Desert Island Discs. He was asked about his eclectic tastes and boundary-pushing creativity; how did he keep that breadth and sharpness. He replied that he never wanted a music platform to say to him 'people like you, also liked this'. He wanted it to say: 'people like you HATE this... ' Because it is only when we engage with the news and views and music that we disagree with, that balance has a chance of returning.

The echo chamber of social media is as pulse quickening as Satan's highlights in Paradise Lost... but with the excitement there is a heavy price to pay. As Adam and Eve found out.