Echo Chamber Analysis

It is without any doubt, that in the last ten years’ technology has evolved and developed in ways that people have never imagined. With the world at our fingertips, and an unlimited supply of information at out access, shouldn’t we be living in a society filled with higher and more educated thinkers? As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel stated in their novel Blur, “When information is in greater supply, knowledge becomes harder to create, because we have to sift through more data to arrive at it. Confusion and uncertainty are more likely.” After reading through some of their main points of their book, I couldn’t agree more with their statement. In an article summarized by the Daily Mail, we already see that Facebook creates an echo chamber for

Many mainstream media outlets engaged in what some believed to be “journalistic bias” causing many people to mistrust the information that was being presented to them. What made the situation even more destructive was the fact, since many social media outlets, like Facebook for example, were providing information only relating to what a person likes and creating an echo chamber. This echo chamber meant that people were only receiving information about a one specific candidate limiting their options and viewpoints of the all the other possibilities. The media plays an important role in providing information to the public, and when they fail to meet standards it can be very disastrous to the mediated culture and can affect society in a positive or negative

When looking at my Facebook and Twitter, I could see that some of my information was “cherry-picked”. Mostly this was an issue on my Facebook, my Twitter on the other hand, had newsfeed from many different media outlets, allowing it to be more diverse. Now that I have gained media literacy skills, I’ll be able to look at a newsfeed and asses it better before making putting together my own opinion. To help make my social media streams more diverse, I could like and follow different news pages, and make sure that I’m not just acquiring my information from solely social media outlets. Overall echo chambers are an important issue that needs to be addressed and fixed. Living in an echo chamber will only lead to closed-mined thinkers and ideas. When unlimited information is so easily accessible, it is important that we educate our communities about media literacy and issues like journalism of affirmation, to better expand not only our knowledge, but also the knowledge of our