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Proyecto Visión 21

It’s time for me to leave my self-imposed “echo chamber”

Francisco Miraval

When I buy a book online, almost immediately I receive numerous ads inviting me to but similar books. Very seldom, if ever, I am invited to buy books with the opposite point of view. I find myself trapped in a similar situation inside the social networks, where the algorithms will allow to see only messages I like to see.

In other words, I live trapped inside a digital “echo chamber”, where the everything I hear, read, or watch confirms what I already know or knew, without ever challenging my own ideas, without ever pushing me to analyze and acknowledge my prejudices, my limitations, my own “truths”.

And if, by luck or by mistake, I happen to see a message with an opinion totally opposed to mine, then I can easily remove that message from my sight and I can, if I want, remove the sender from my life. The other may not even know I am no longer his/her “friend” and he/she could wrongly assume I am still receiving the messages.

For that reason, day after day I am going deeper and deeper into my echo chamber, which it appears to me as in inverted Platonic cave, because I did not arrive there as a prisoner, but on my own free will and voluntarily I chain myself to my own preconceived ideas, thus limiting my world to whatever reverberates inside my echo chamber.

I wasn’t always like that. There was a time when I was happy to read anything contradicting my ideas. And I was also happy to talk with those embracing those other ideas. I didn’t want to refute or correct them. I just wanted to talk, without any kind of apologetic intentions.

In fact, that’s why I decided to study humanities. My goal and desire (a selfish desire, I know) was to understand other people and their ideas hoping that will lead to a better understanding of myself and my own ideas. In doing so, again and again I discovered “my” ideas were not mine. I was just thoughtlessly repeating what others already said.

I thought I will keep an open mind all my life about a wide variety of issues. After all, I am the owner of truth and I am not renting the truth either. In fact, I do hope I am keeping an open mind and, if not, that I will soon be able to do it.

However, I now feel trapped inside my “own” ideas, which it seems it is the only thing I can hear again and again inside the walls of my echo chamber, where all dissonance seems to be filtered out. The intolerance to the dissonance means that the there is no need to hear the “other”: I can safely ignore him/her or “unfriend” him/her.

Then, the immensity of the cave of my own ideas gets smaller and smaller to the point of being alone, kept inside an unbearable solipsism with no windows to outside, superbly deceived by my “own” ideas.

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