Guest Commentary: Ethics in the Echo Chamber
Jan 22nd, 2008 • Posted in: Commentaryby Ethics Newsline® editor Carl Hausman
I met myself online two years ago and have gotten to know myself pretty well since then.
When I was ordering a book from Amazon.com, I discovered that the site “recommended” books and music based on my previous buying and browsing records. I got hooked. The more customized suggestions Amazon.com offered, the more I snapped them up.
Looking back at my purchase history, I’ve learned a few things about myself. In some ways, I seem like a fairly normal if eclectic person: My musical tastes run toward an odd mixture of Mozart and 1970s nostalgia, and to books about politics, the Internet, and media history.
But lurking in the Amazon.com list is what seems to be evidence of a sinister obsession with true crime. On further reflection, I noted that in a typical week I also gravitate to a dozen cable-TV crime shows that involve increasingly inventive examples of antisocial behavior.
I’m not sure I like the picture that’s emerging — a media system that not only knows my tastes but feeds and solidifies them. Given the current pattern, will I, in 2019, have anything on my media menu other than disco, Mozart, and murder?
Luckily, one of the books I ordered recently might head off this fate. Republic.com 2.0, by University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, examines the practical and ethical effects of media echo chambers on public discourse.
What I’ve done, according to Sunstein, is create my prototype “Daily Me” — an electronic diet of media consumerism tailored to my tastes. But mine is in its infancy and limited primarily to my interests in entertainment. A true Daily Me allows the user to completely retreat into a world where all of the day’s news corresponds to a particular interest or point of view, making the user become at once connected (with others who share a view or a lifestyle) and isolated (from unexpected encounters with different cultures or dissenting opinions).
The outcome of the Daily Me is polarization: Studies show that groups adopt more extreme views when they communicate only with like-minded people.
Such polarization is by no means a distant threat. Blogs, which in many cases have evolved into magnetic forums for like-minded people talking exclusively to each other, have become the new frontier in U.S. presidential politics. Social networking sites, where users can wall themselves up in identity-based communities, are becoming as “real” to some users as real life. Websites for those with extreme and insular views have become media forces that cohere public opinion, sometimes along extreme tangents. Extremists and a variety of conspiracy theorists regularly reinforce their views with “facts” that have become reality only because they are echoed so often and “reporting” that looks like journalism but isn’t, in the sense that a journalist seeks balance or contrary opinions, or presents alternative explanations.
What’s the ethical issue with the Daily Me? I have no problem with customized news. After all, you are reading this on a custom-news site where we view news items of mutual interest. But in the news summaries we gather, we make a good-faith effort to include publications and venues from differing ends of the political spectrum — reliable sources that you might not necessarily agree with, and which you might not encounter unless you went looking for them.
But I do take ethical issue with industrywide trends that lean toward a product designed to polarize, to repackage the output of the echo chamber as “journalism” or “news.”
“News” that isolates us from the unexpected or unpleasant or unfamiliar isn’t really news at all, and it’s a poor diet for people who need a comprehensive worldview in order to feed a deliberative democracy.
I’m 54 years old and formed my news consumption habits by watching Walter Cronkite, who occasionally force-fed me a story about a remote area of the world that I should care about even if I’d never heard of it before. A generation ago, my family, like most in our working-class neighborhood, subscribed to not one but two daily newspapers, vehicles that presented an array of stories at a single glance and cultivated the habit of getting hooked on stories we didn’t go looking for.
As a result, I’ve probably been inoculated to some extent. I’m able to tell when I’m overdosing on forensic shows and documentaries about bank robberies, grab myself by the lapels, and shake myself back to reality. But I’m not sure if younger people, raised on customizable and increasingly narrow media menus, have built up similar resistance.
The bottom line:
- Media organizations, especially those that present themselves as news suppliers, have an ethical responsibility to be something above and beyond that of profit-centered echo chambers.
- Media consumers — and that’s all of us — have an affirmative duty to monitor our own habits and stay engaged with a broad variety of opinions and perspectives, even if they don’t always make us comfortable.
- Parents, teachers, and other responsible adults have a moral responsibility to let younger people know that there are alternative universes outside of their customizable media-saturated universes.
Issues like this tend to creep up on us like quiet jungle cats, and we tend not to notice them until they’re upon us. Think back to 1992, when Bruce Springsteen poked fun at the infinite but vacuous media universe with his song “57 Channels and Nothing On.”
I don’t know about you, but I get about 350 channels, and that’s with the basic package.
57 channels? How quaint.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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