The Echo Chamber Effect?

Seeing as this is my first post in the class blog, and last weeks lecture was based on blogging, I’m kinda guessing that this initial entry will work out best if I discuss…wait for it…“The Blog”. I narrowed this large topic down to an interesting point that was brought up during the lecture; the idea of blogs creating a type of ‘echo chamber effect’. Just how effective is the use of this term to describe blogs?

Using the definition that was presented in the GNN clip on Wednesday, journalist Andrew Coyne stated that the echo chamber effect is “people talking to themselves and repeating their own opinions back to each other”. In the same clip, GNN’s Stephen Marshall says that this is apparent in his own site, as “huge contingents specifically come for what they’re looking for.”

It is a very persuasive idea, summing up bloggers as people who connect only with other people of the same mind. Although the statements were made in reference to political blogs, I find it applicable to all blog genres; our own class blog for example. This is the only blog that I have ever kept a regular watch on. Why? (apart from the grading) Because it involves people/students like me who are studying/interested/getting interested in digital media. This in turn has led me to search for, and look at other blogs which are also concerned with digital media, like MediaShift. I haven’t bothered to search for or kept track of any blog about “analog” media as such. I see this as an echo chamber effect of sorts.

However, I can see where the echo chamber effect has its limitations. On blogger.com dashboards for instance, (as is the case on many other sites) drifting away from your original intent is easy to do. With links to “blogs of note” to “recently updated blogs”, and even to the personal blogs of class users, I can’t say that I have been able to resist clicking on links that I would otherwise not have been interested in. Many posts in the class blog have comments that argue against the post itself. And a lot of Kevin’s posts too have led me to sites and articles that I would probably never have looked for.

On the one hand we have this “birds of a feather, sticking together” complex, where people use blogs and the internet to reinforce, and validate their interests/beliefs. Yet on the other hand we have this type of idea from the first lecture about constructing non-linear narratives that diversify our interests/beliefs.

So, is it valuable to describe blogs by using the echo chamber effect? For me and my experience of blogging, I would have to say no. I think that both of the above concepts are put to use when I’m online. Because although I start out on the internet to search for/read specific things of interest, I’m always finding that I tend to click on ‘this’ and ‘that’ link, which are pretty much irrelevant to what I begun looking for.

Hope the post wasn’t too long of a read.
Allan