Echo Chambers

An "echo chamber" is an environment where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce their own, hence the word "echo;" whatever you say sounds like an echo coming back at you because everyone in your surrounding has the same thoughts as you. Echo chambers are heavily reinforced by social media through confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when someone only looks for or listens to things that are in favor of your thoughts and opinions.

I thought this term was especially interesting because echo chambers are so prominent, but many people are in denial that they exist. We see this, prominently, with mainstream media consumption. Fox News and CNN are extremely different networks in the sense that Fox displays conservative news and CNN displays democratic news. Obviously, people who identify politically as republican will tune into Fox News and vice versa. This is a very large example of an echo chamber; you probably don't engage in conversation with someone with different opinions as you unless you're looking for an argument of some sort.

Echo chambers can be problematic because individuals begin to see only one side of things and this then turns into them seeing the "right" side of things. This leads to close-mindedness across society and divides groups of people who should be embracing their differences.