In an epistemic bubble, outside voices aren’t heard.

I’ve seen echo chambers on the left, but also on parenting forums, nutritional forums and even around exercise methods. And echo chambers aren’t just on the right. In that way, an echo chamber is a lot like a cult.Įcho chambers isolate their members, not by cutting off their lines of communication to the world, but by changing whom they trust. Anybody on the outside was malicious and untrustworthy. People were trustworthy if they were on Limbaugh’s side. Limbaugh presented the world as a simple binary – as a struggle only between good and evil. Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News team, they said, systematically manipulated whom their followers trusted. Two communications scholars, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella, offered a careful analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber in their 2008 book, “The Echo Chamber.” And that means that an insider’s trust for other insiders can grow unchecked. They’re never exposed to the other side’s views.Īn echo chamber leads its members to distrust everybody on the outside of that chamber. They hear arguments and evidence only from their side of the political spectrum. When a person gets all their news and political arguments from Facebook and all their Facebook friends share their political views, they’re in an epistemic bubble. My research focuses on “epistemic bubbles” and “echo chambers.” These are two distinct ideas, that people often blur together.Īn epistemic bubble is what happens when insiders aren’t exposed to people from the opposite side.Īn echo chamber is what happens when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside.Īn epistemic bubble, for example, might form on one’s social media feed. In my mind, the crucial issue right now isn’t what people hear, but whom people believe. From my perspective as a philosopher who thinks about communities and trust, this fails to get at the heart of the issue.

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