Academic Echo Chambers

Academic echo chambers

“Twitter makes smart people dumb,” tweeted George Siemens.  Siemens is reflecting on the fact that algorithms based on retweets make our networks more and more homogenous, and our language is limited to 140 characters and conversation bytes.  He is also throwing out argument bait to elicit counter-discourse, in my opinion. Or he is just privileged and arrogant calling his colleagues dumb, some of whom find a voice and self-positioning with social media that they would not find otherwise.  Sherrie Spelic took the bait, indicating that she was annoyed by both his baiting and his apparent arrogance.  She replied on her blog that Twitter does not have that kind of control over us, and that she is “nobody’s version of dumb.”  Spelic is making the point that with some amount of effort and a general mindset of growth, we need not dismiss the forum altogether.  An article from Science in conjunction with Facebook shows that users actually cull their feeds to match their opinions, overriding the algorithms.  “Compared to algorithmic ranking, individuals’ choices about what to consume had a stronger effect limiting exposure to [ideologically] cross-cutting content” (2015, p. 1130). So users are more responsible for their homogenous feeds than Facebook.  So if we are in echo chambers, we can’t just blame the Facebook algorithm.  

After I read the blog post by Spelic, I checked the comments.  They were 100% positive.  George Siemens did not step up for a rebuttal.  In some ways, this alone is some evidence that Siemens is correct in saying that we create our own “safe spaces.”   Maybe it means that there is some amount of civility left on social media and people don’t choose the twitter space for their discourse space.  Actually, both these authors are on the same page in valuing a more diverse discourse.  They just respond to the problem differently.  Siemens complains about it and Spelic reaches out to a larger community.  I would like to know more about how she does this because as scholars, I think we can be enriched by coming up against more ideas, fewer silos, and more interdisciplinary sharing.  But taking the time to intentionally diversify my social media feed is not something I have done up to this point.  And I also get annoyed by social media as a result of my own failure to find that which is inspiring and challenging to fill my feed.  

I think it’s also important to note that you can’t read silence on social media as well as you can in a conversation.  Perhaps the argument and back and forth struggle of ideas that would make people “smart” on social media doesn’t always happen because it is too public a forum.   Perhaps if we read the sound of “crickets” as a signal to take the debate elsewhere, we will get a more serious response.

Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. A. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130–1132. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160 

Spelic, S. (2019). Nobody's Version of Dumb. In R. Kimmons, EdTech in the Wild: critical blog posts. EdTech Books. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/wild/version_of_dumb