It’s quite common to have a go-to source for information and news. I’m primarily a consumer of science-related media.
Someone else might be interested in some other niche area of information: video games, sports, celebrity news or whatever the case may be.
The niches we sometimes settle in have been on the rise for a while now, according to a 2009 report from the Pew Research Center.
This hurts general news outlets, and undercuts the diversity of information consumed by any given individual.
A 2015 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used network science models on social media to see how rumors and misinformation tend to spread through social media.
The study found echo chambers isolate niches in which information resonates, relatively without external influence.
These echo chambers were prevalent among scientific news consumers and conspiracy theorists. As described in the paper, these communities are usually “homogenous and polarized” and have “similar information consumption patterns.”
According to the article, this polarization and homogeneity lead “to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust, and paranoia.”
A professor from the Rochester Institute of Technology found politically-derogatory prejudices and rumors spread easily in Democrat and Republican-only groups of people.
But when the groups mixed democratic and republican members, the ideas didn’t gain as much of a foothold.
Even from a purely pedestrian standpoint this makes sense.
Take for example the upcoming election: there have been countless examples on social media of straw-man attacks on various candidates.
These tend to be ignored by those who disagree and affirmed by those who agree, which allows the attack to gain strength within its own echo chamber.
The real takeaway from these studies and from the election media is we need to be wary of our own tendencies to form echo chambers like this.
We should acknowledge what looks to us like harmless niche media consumption may seem to others like narrow-minded promotion of a biased narrative.
Unfortunately, no single individual can do anything significant about the formation of these biases, but we can vary our own consumption of information in order to transcend our penchant, and firmly promote a simple, narrow worldview.
This might not extend far beyond our own minds.
But as a matter of personal health it certainly benefits us to broaden our exploration of the world around us and to remain aware of the faults in our own information consumption habits.
jacob.worrell@gmail.com
