Today, it feels like individuals simply choose the reality they wish to exist within. Information, news, and facts are less of a meal and more of a buffet. We can take what we want back to our tables, ignore the rest, and proceed through our lives. It seems the only thing we could all agree on is somehow that so-called Echo Chambers are bad. This alone is strange because we can't agree on who is actually in an echo chamber. To group A, group B is the guilty party; to group B, group A is instead the easiest diagnosis. Here is that people simply do not hear opinions from an opposing side, but that is in fact a completely different phenomenon than what is occurring today. As well-trodden as this subject may seem, we have a fundamental misunderstanding of echo chambers. Media literacy will be an important piece of this puzzle, as will a third point, one more extraordinary in which the true aggressors seem to go unaccused. TNN is a professor at the University of Utah. His research largely focuses on how social structures manipulate rationality.

and information processing. In 2020, he published a paper called Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. By grasping the distinction between these two phenomena, we can get closer to a full understanding of true Echo Chambers. By Nin's estimation, many people use the term Echo chamber when they are in fact discussing epistemic bubbles. Although it may feel like an exercise in semantics, the distinction between epistemic Bubbles and Echo Chambers matters a lot. By understanding our structures and systems of knowledge, we are better equipped to uncover their shortcomings and identify if we are in fact in an echo chamber. Of course, the more we understand something, the easier it then becomes to dismantle. Now, one thing we need to keep in mind is the Reliance on third parties for information. This is not a bad thing at all; in fact, this Reliance is necessary. Our world is set up in a way which requires us to lean on outside sources for knowledge. There's just too much info in the world, and despite what internet rabbit holes may lead us to believe, a given

individual is not a subject matter expert in well, almost anything. We have to rely on third parties. We know it is bad to smoke cigarettes, not because we are experts on the human respiratory system. Instead, those people who are have done the research and can tell us this is true. We know to avoid drinking bleach, not because we are experts on toxicology, but instead the people who are have informed us not to drink bleach. We don't know exercise is good because we're all sports scientists. We don't know our brakes stop our cars because we're all expert mechanics, etc., etc. These types of structures aren't always bad either, as NN points out. If you were an anti-nazi in Nazi Germany, you would be correct to exist within an anti-nazi echo chamber. You would do well to reject the prevailing consensus based solely on the fact that it was so prevalent. The problem occurs when we begin to manipulate and exploit these concepts. As NN says, an epistemic bubble is a social structure which excludes relevant information and voices through omission.

that is to say, these bubbles lack aggression or even ill intent. We stay in touch with our friends who have similar worldviews to ours. We draw from similar news sources as people we like or respect. This gives us a filtered sort of worldview, which omits contrary views and artificially inflates our own self-confidence. Epistemic bubbles are bad, but they are not malicious. More likely, they are just a negative side effect of the way we are required to interface with the world. Thankfully, epistemic bubbles are easy to break down. In these bubbles, people do not actively crusade against other opinions, so as we introduce new opinions, we find a population that is open to them. By injecting new ideas into epistemic bubbles, we have basically solved the problem. I would argue, though, that epistemic bubbles are pretty rare, especially in online discourse. More common are echo chambers. In an echo chamber, relevant opposing voices are actively discredited. These structures work by intentionally isolating members from outside sources. The result is an inflated dependence on insider authority.

figures in rejecting all outside sources of information. We have what can best be described as cult-like behavior. There is one leader or a cadre of leaders who all have the ultimate knowledge and keys to a so-described truth or reality. Echo chambers present a number of self-strengthening traits which make them almost impossible to untangle. The first is inside language. Echo chambers employ their own sort of slang. People who know or understand a certain set of words are insiders, and those who reject this language are outsiders. This is a simple tactic, but this mounting distance from outsiders then produces another hallmark of the echo chamber: disagreement reinforcement. This mechanism is the armor that echo chambers so effectively wear. The leader of an echo chamber tells its members that the rest of the world hates the group for knowing some truth, and that outsiders will label in members as crazy, cultish, or lunatics. The leader says that outsiders will tell the echo chain that they are incorrect. This is a clever trick because when one takes

false beliefs into the world. The world will absolutely confront an individual on those grounds, but with the disagreement reinforcement mechanism, those confrontations serve only to strengthen in members' faith in their leaders. He told me you would say that, so he must be smart, credible, correct, etc. This is why factual information does basically nothing to shatter Echo Chambers. Those within the chamber are already prepared to hear and reject information. More to the point, individuals are prepared in a way that opposition just galvanizes their belief in the Echo chamber. So we have the self-sustaining nature of these structures. Each time Outsiders try to deploy factual information, they just strengthen the barrier between the echo chamber and outside reality. Attempts to break them down only fortify their walls. Echo Chambers exist as perversions of a reasonable knowledge system. They disregard the information and instead place emphasis on the authority figure. Conversely, it is not the opposing facts which in-members reject, but often the people who are presenting them. When we

discuss the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen. Those who believe this often reject not the material facts at hand but CNN, NBC, Reuters, or whoever is speaking them. In a healthy epistemic community, as NN says, there is an upper ceiling on the credibility of any individual. If our plumber tells us we need a new toilet, we believe him. If our plumber tells us that aliens are coming from Mars and sabotaging our toilet while we sleep, not so much. Say we applied an echo chamber to the aforementioned situation. We would be perfectly happy to accept this bizarre alien-based diagnosis. This phenomenon is called Runaway Credence. The structure of echo chambers allows not fact to reign supreme but instead the individual delivering information. Because trust is not in information, information alone cannot break down an echo chamber, especially when we consider the disagreement reinforcement mechanism. These solutions to echo chambers are surely complex, disparate, and would take years to implement, the contributing factors to the phenomenon equally so.

can't claim to be an expert on any of these things: social media algorithms, a justified mistrust in our government, human psychology, to name a few. But I do think I'm in a position to speak about one of the many keys that is media literacy. So, in an effort to do my part, which is of course all that I can do, we must engage in a real conversation about understanding, consuming, and producing media. What is media literacy? Educator Elizabeth Toman put it well when she said, Media literacy is the ability to create personal meaning from verbal and visual symbols we take in every day. It's the ability to choose and select, the ability to challenge and question, the ability to be conscious about what is going on around us and not be passive and vulnerable. This is not a new conversation. In 1933, Levas and Thompson proposed teaching UK students how to distinguish between forms of popular culture. This signified a protectionist approach, the idea was to promote higher forms of culture to combat poor information distributed through the

widespread availability of mass printing in the 1970s. The American government and private sectors mirrored this protectionism and financially supported media literacy education in schools. This was done through a CVS or a critical viewing skills curricula. When we look into the programs and people who led them, we see a rather underfunded, half-hazard, and disappointing implementation. Indeed, these media literacy programs never really became more than a passing fad. The 90s also saw a piecemeal resurgence in media literacy education, but again, to no real significant end. Today, scholars point largely to the movement's protectionist approach for its failure. American media literacy education painted the advent of television broadly as a danger to young people without highlighting the medium's tremendous educational upsides as well. All of these half-hearted attempts are partly to blame for our current predicament, but I would also suggest that our collective ideas about media literacy have remained the same while media itself has changed drastically in the past. Media had the power to change.

culture, but it existed outside of culture. Many people my age and older can remember times when people with differing media diets got along quite magnanimously. However, now media is culture. If you consume Fox News or CNN or BBC, that alone is a cultural signifier. Unfortunately, things like Twitter follows say something very real and meaningful about you as a person. The internet fundamentally changed our media landscape, while our ideas about media literacy really have remained stagnant. Troublesome though it is to admit, and we will discuss this later, the modern citizen must be New Media literate to participate responsibly in our society. But before we can understand a framework for new media literacy, we must understand the New Media landscape. Traditional mediums still exist, of course, and they still have some influence, but it is reasonable to declare that modern media is largely on the internet. That is Web 2.0. Before our current ERA of internet technology, we existed with something called Web 1.0. This early type of internet technology is often described as read-only. There was very little

participation from the user. Instead, web 1.0 was basically just a new way to distribute information. The user could consume digital formats, communicate one-to-one through email and chat rooms, and do basic creative work. However, these users could not really participate en masse in Internet content creation. In the early 2000s, this began to change. Social networking sites began to appear, comment sections, likes, favorites, and reposts by users became cornerstones of the online experience. This is Web 2.0, where we exist today. The read-only internet is dead. It is now easy for a user to make their voice heard, to adopt identities through online communities, and to participate in the construction of ideas themselves. This is, in many ways, a good thing. Our online diet is not monopolized by large corporations, nor do we have the problem of bad faith gatekeepers. Although the idea of meritocracy is perhaps fantastical, Web 2.0 has made creative work into something much closer to this utopian ideal. Individuals can contribute works to communities, which

are receptive to them. This has developed strong incentives for creative expression. We can publish things to people who very well may like them, thus encouraging more people to create more things freely. Great ideas are no longer shackled by technical knowledge. We have seen movement within the arts, music, and culture like never before, often in positive ways. However, Web 2.0 has had immense negative impacts on our information culture. Within Web 1.0, users were generally consumers of media produced by experts. It was akin to the traditional publishing environment, but in 2.0, the non-expert consumers are also the producers. Users can collectively publish and echo any bit of information which they find acceptable, regardless of how subject matter experts may feel about the material. The result has been clear as day. Web 2.0 is so rife with misinformation published by unqualified individuals that attempting to weed through the true and untrue is a seemingly impossible task. Furthermore, as 2.0 users can develop social communities around this information, media has become

More than a mover of culture, it is again culture itself. T. Newan has also published a small piece on a new phenomenon which has emerged with Web 2.0, that is the idea of pornography. Nin describes pornography as this: an image is sexual pornography when we use it for immediate gratification while avoiding the complexities of actual sexual relationships like physical intimacy, emotional connection, and romantic interaction. As our identities become wrapped up in online media, so has emerged a new version of pornography. Consider food porn. These are images of delicious food we engage with without worrying about the labor of cooking, the effects of calorie or nutritional intake, or the availability of ingredients themselves. Well, we now have outrage porn. This is basically information we engage with for emotional stimulation while avoiding the practical realities of that information itself. This news story makes you feel X, and it is that feeling which we pursue rather than the fact, fiction, bias, or subtext of the information presented. When points to the traditional problem with sexual pornography, it portrays sex in wildly unrealistic terms.

and consumers are at risk to export those terms into real sex. So too is the risk with outrage pornography. It colors how we perceive the world around us in a way that is emblematic of failed media literacy. So the question is then how do we update our version of media literacy to meet a new Modern Standard. Generally pretty picky about sponsorship in these videos but ground news is a great tool to help with media literacy. News outlets come with their own swarm of subtextual issues, bias, corporate ownership, even sheer factuality. Ground news is a website and app that can help you sort through all of these. It gathers articles from over 50,000 sources so you can compare how different news outlets are reporting the same story. It has a suite of tools that detect political bias, reliability, and even who funds a given news outlet. These ratings are all backed by Independent News monitoring organizations so you can trust that ground news itself isn't just another thing you need to decode. My favorite feature is the ground news ownership tool. Big media conglomerates

control the news, and they shape the world we live in. With the ownership tool, you can see who owns the news you are consuming. It even breaks down what specific media conglomerates are publishing specific stories. If a news story is from an individual, a government, or an independent publication, Ground News tells you that too. It's so important to understand who is making money off the news you're consuming. For example, the EPA will be awarding $4.3 billion in grants to combat pollution. When you read this story on Ground News, you can see who is reporting it, who isn't, and the reliability and ownership of each source. Ground News also has a blind spot feature, which shows what stories are getting attention exclusively from right or left-leaning sources. Even if you don't agree with the other side, it is important to get a well-rounded sense of cultural discourse. Ground News also has a way to basically audit yourself after you've been using the platform for a while. It populates a section called My News Bias. Here, you can see an in-depth

analysis of your own news consumption, including your top sources, how biased your media consumption is, and what blind spots you may have. I like ground news because it doesn't push you stories based on algorithms. It actively fights against Echo bubbles by giving you all of the news with insights on bias, credibility, and ownership. Major news outlets want to foment outrage and get clicks so they can sell ad space, but ground news is funded by subscribers, so there are no ads anywhere on the platform. Personally, I have been using ground news recently, and I sincerely think it's a great product. The more people that engage with the news in an honest, well-rounded way, the better off we all are. There's a link in my description where you can get 40% off the same all-access Vantage plan that I use. That plan gets you access to all of the features I mentioned here on ground news. Check it out, support the channel, and build better news habits. In 2013, Zu bin Lin, Jen Y Lee, fangang, and Ling Le published a paper.

called understanding new media literacy an explorative theoretical framework. I've leaned on this paper quite heavily for this video, but in the work, the authors also present a plan for New media literacy. Their plan consists of basically five parts: consuming, understanding, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Each of these steps is remarkably simple, but the sum of these parts creates a solid strategy for media consumption. Furthermore, the paper presents three additional pieces for responsible media production, which is equally important given that we are all media producers today. The consuming skill is the simple technical ability to intake media, how to operate a computer, how to locate information, how to broadly use the internet. As a companion to consuming, the researchers point to the fundamental ability to understand media. We should be able to understand the new era language used by New Era media. We should be able to read paragraphs and understand sentences as they are presented. We must understand what a headline or a passage means, regardless of the platform on which it is published. Modern media has its own slang, shorthand, and language that we

should know now. Most people already have a grasp of consuming and understanding, so it is in the following steps where we find a need for growth. The third step is analysis. The individual must be able to perform surface-level criticism of media messages. We must understand when language is coded, when bias is presented, and when certain sides of an issue are omitted. We should understand who is presenting a piece of media and what their relationship to the issue at hand may be. At its core, we must perceive media not as neutral conveyors of objective reality. Instead, we should recognize that all media is the result of subjective, socially driven processes. More specifically, the arrival of media at our attention is certainly subjective. Why are we seeing this news story? What circuits are we plugged into, which push a given piece of media to our attention? From here, we move into the more treacherous realm of synthesis. This refers to the user's ability to internally remix media and oppose it against or integrate it responsibly with one's own viewpoints. If CNN tells us X

how does X reconcile with our core beliefs and knowledge? Do we inherently agree or disagree, and why? This is not necessarily an immediate quest to some objective truth; rather, it is the acknowledgement that a given piece of media carries with it subtext, implication, and bias. We don't necessarily need to reject media on this bias, but instead appreciate that it exists and bring these subtexts into how we pause media. The final step on the path is evaluation. When we have equipped ourselves with the aforementioned pieces, what do we get? This is a difficult step, and one that many people, myself included, must consistently remind ourselves of. We must pose a piece of media against concepts like motivation, identities, power dynamics, and ideologies. This step involves a decision-making process, which the others do not. We must decide ultimately to what extent we will accept or reject the information itself, not solely the parties publishing it. Media outfits have embedded ideologies and power dynamics which greatly influence what these outfits produce, but the media itself also has embedded purposes beyond relaying.

information we must recognize all of these and carefully consider to what extent we will accept or reject any given piece of material. Now, it seems to me that the researcher's framework could be applied to Old World Media as well. It is not entirely uniquely suited to New Media, but in this same paper, we are given a framework for producing media. This is critical. We are all producers of media. When we retweet, share, or comment on something, we are operating in a similar capacity to any other media producer. And so, we must not just consume but produce responsibly, regardless of how amateurish, crude, or minute we may see our Productions. The researchers provide five parts which are critical to the New Media landscape: prosuming, distribution, production, participation, and creation. The consumers are now the producers, and so prosuming is the simple technical ability to create media online. We just need to know how to Work Platforms and applications. Alongside this, there is distribution and production. These are essentially more forms of technical knowledge. Individuals should understand how their chosen platforms distribute the material they create, what communities will see a piece

of media. How can we honestly and responsibly mix, match, and remix work into something new? So then we move on to participation, which calls for more critical thought than the technical prerequisites in the New Media environment. Users participate to create material alongside one another. Individuals refine, critique, and co-construct each other's ideas. As we do this, we must be aware of the sociocultural values, power, and ideology in this process. We should be able to discuss different ideas within different social communities, rather than exclusively for a specific audience or indeed an echo chamber. We should be willing to carry an openness to different social groups while we participate in online creation. When we move away from lateral communication and exchange of ideas, we get into the sphere of outright creation. Today, this is regarded quite casually, whether it is writing a tweet, making an Instagram post, or producing a 40-minute long YouTube video. Users generally proceed headstrong, guided by their own vision. This is good creatively, but we must also reckon with the informational impact of the things we make. We should

be able to analyze if what we are doing is honest, if it adds positive discourse to the world, or if it folds into yet another echo chamber. I know these steps and processes all sound incredibly simple, maybe even intuitive, but they have not been applied to the new media landscape, to the world in which we are all media producers, and so it is appropriate to begin with the basic. But really, there is a bigger question: why do we need to do any of this? The above frameworks are certainly helpful in pursuing a modern version of media literacy, but the frustrating truth is that they are in many ways unrealistic. A near microscopic portion of internet users will see this video, and even fewer will ever read the papers discussed here. I cannot really deploy this information and believe that everyone who uses the internet will fundamentally change their habits. That would be naive. It would be hoping for a small solution to a big problem. That problem, it seems to me, is this: those in power in America refuse to take responsibility for their actions.

the nature of the world they've built. Whether we discuss media literacy, echo chambers, division, or the swift rise of extreme ideology in the United States, our leaders seem dumbfounded. They look around, grasping stupidly at rhetoric and surface-level solutions, wondering how things got this way. But in truth, these leaders must only look in the mirror. The US government has routinely lied to its population. They have deceived us about foreign and domestic policy. They act on behalf of special interest groups, their own power positions, their bank accounts, and global American supremacy. As they proceed in this way, these individuals construct illusions and tales about the ostensible goodness of their deeds. The government has allowed tech companies to act with near autonomy. Today, these technocrats play with our economy and our culture like puppeteers. They are permitted to manipulate the public, create destructive algorithms, and spread hatred, all in the pursuit of never-ending capital growth. More traditional media outlets are too empowered to act with wild indiscretion. The largest news channels in our country

spew incendiary stories to the public, which are laden with omissions and misleading information. These media companies are driven to steal your attention and pour their audiences out to multinational corporations, which often own those news outlets themselves. It should be no wonder that our relationship to media is in such decay. A structure so extraordinary can only produce extraordinary results. I understand that people have free agency; they can do things and not do things. They can choose their own information diet. Surely, for any given individual, it may be possible to successfully navigate modern media, but we should not be so presumptuous as to assume that broadly we can expect this from the population in a widespread way. People have lives to lead; they have jobs and responsibilities. They are talented in ways and obtuse in others. We cannot expect everyone to spend their days combing through research on media literacy. This is an absurd notion. Consider this alongside the media apparatuses that we are posed against. Tech companies plunge billions of dollars in the world's most intelligent

Minds into developing their algorithms. They have armies dedicated to the continued operation of their endeavors. They are behemoths which plow forward with only capital in mind. We are not David fighting Goliath; this would be far too generous. We are instead like an ant fighting God himself. If those in power wish to keep faith in the Invisible Hand to create our media landscape, so be it. But those same people must empower the citizens to function within that landscape. Like so many of our problems, media literacy and Echo Chambers are the result of structures put in place, of systems and policies enacted by those in power. Top-down problems require top-down solutions. We must earnestly dedicate resources to media literacy programs in schools. We must educate the youth on how to function in our hailstorm of information. Further, I believe we may need to seriously assess how we distribute time and resources in our public education systems. Should a teenager be spending their time on advanced trigonometry while ignoring the most basic skills required to function in our world? More to the point, should

these skills be relegated to extracurriculars and optional electives, and indeed new media literacy is a required skill. Our systems have created a world which is largely digital, and so those same systems must empower individuals to function successfully there. In as things stand, our media landscape is a game authored by a cadre of individuals who have not distributed instructions on how to actually play, and still after many rounds, the creators look around like stupid people wondering why no one is able to win this game they have built, wondering why the board is in such disarray. It is truly an absurdity. Three years ago, I was tuna fishing off the coast of Mexico. We fished for several days on the dark blue water, and of the dozen people on the boat, not one caught anything. This long period of inactivity meant we spent most of our time talking to one another. I spoke to one man who insisted that the COVID-19 pandemic had been somehow planned by the government and that the vaccines were

full of tracking devices. In the moment, the level of ignorance displayed by the man hit me with wild frustration. I did not press the issue. I had that debilitating form of shock which comes when being met with information that was so removed from reality that no argument could ever make any progress. Later, I spoke to my friend Everett on the drive home from the harbor. We had no fish to speak of, so with great and almost embarrassing anger, I told Everett about the conversation with the man. I told him that the man wasn't even functioning within reality. My friend Everett returned that to him, the fisherman. He was indeed living in reality, that what he described was his reality, that no matter how bizarre it may have seemed, the information he espoused was as real to him as the sky being blue or the grass being green. I still think about this conversation often. Everett was right. Individuals today have the ability to select and construct a reality which suits them. They may live in this alternate dimension which is just as real to them as anything may be to me.

this is not to justify the man's position or his ignorance. Instead, it is to reflect on the nature of our world, which now consists of endless different realities. This is a problem. I can't honestly say that I possess a panacea, and this video really only scratched the surface of this whole issue. But I do think that if we address how to interface with the world, we can address the world itself. We can begin to make things right.

Echo Chambers, Explained

Echo Chambers, Explained

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