Echo chambers in the web

The first time I experienced being in an "echo chamber," as it has been dubbed, was when I joined a forum in 2002. It was a "free thinking" type forum that questioned all dogma. I was in my twenties and was rebelling against what I perceived as the status quo. At first I thought, "This is great, like-minded people discussing similar ideas" but after a few months (it didn't take long), I noticed that the discussion began repeating itself and I perceived some individuals as too narrow minded and not at all the open-minded individuals that they espoused themselves to be. It also became a "choir preaching to itself" phenomena, where people with similar world-views get together, like each other's posts, and everyone ends up thinking the same thing. It certainly did not reflect the outside world and I got bored and left.

   by  wetwebwork 

It was a really good experience because it showed how when a "community" identify themselves as such, there is the inevitability of individuals seeing themselves as either the "insider" or the "other," and thus not engaging with other "outsiders" of the discourse. What I have found is that on the Internet, as in life, when you hang around only a type of people you risk being inward thinking. I realised that I did not want to go in that direction. Perhaps, as Paul highlights in his blog about "homophily," where some community members do not grow because they remain within the cultural group they were either born in or have adapted to, some individuals do it to have a sense of belonging. I saw this in the communities that I grew up in. I was a first-generation Australian but many of my extended family members or friends, many not born in Australia, remained in their cultural community, some not even learning English, although this was mostly due to the regions they came from and level of education.

I also saw the phenomena of homophilia in the workplace, where like-minded individuals built and sustained relationships, creating insiders and outsiders. This is one of my concerns about having schools operate like Charter schools in America, where the principal has the power to hire and fire. In my experience these groups can be mighty effective in enforcing who is in the "in" crowd and who belongs in the "out" crowd. However, this is certainly not isolated to just education and exists in all workplaces, therefore, Charter schools, particularly cyberschools, do have many things going for them, such as allowing some students to be taught over the Internet and engage in employment at the same time.

Andrew wrote a post about the negative aspects of NGL, such as the lack of access to technology for many students around Australia, and the difficulties some students may have with working online, particularly due to their unfamiliarity with technology or their preference to learn in other ways. These are definitely issues that I have seen first-hand. In previous posts I have also voiced my concern about what will happen to "knowledge" and the difficulties of not being able to interact in person (i.e. the social isolation). I have seen a lot of students prefer working online and some even appear to avoid interpersonal communication. However, even before the advent of computers there have been individuals who prefer one type of communication over another. I think computers have, for many, provided them with a voice that they did not have before. It is certainly a highly complex area that I wish to know more about.