Isolated echo chambers may be an improvement, overall.
What's toxic about flat social spaces is that conversations gets reduced to fights between the most vocal, thoughtless, or aggressive holders of opinion X and !X. And this influences the acceptable modes of social behavior. It leaks to real life and institutions. It is corrosive.
First assumption made is that echo chambers do not exist in twitter. This seems to be based on a somewhat patronizing view of humanity that excludes the possibility of willful affinity and choice by the individual, and posits an environmental basis for opinion formation. You can easily dissuade yourself of this by picking a hot divisive topic, choose your side, and follow tweets. You will be in an echo chamber on Twitter.
So I propose we consider the two distinct goals that seem to get conflated in these discussions:
Goal 1: promote uniformity of acceptable opinion du jour.
Goal 2: prevent the poisoning of general social norms, discourse, and institutions by the ideological warfare on social networks.
The latter goal 2 appeals to my sensibilities. And post Elon acquisition, most seem to be lamenting the loss of political control over Twitter (goal 1).
Actually, most that I'm aware of are lamenting the loss of goal 2, in that they believe (correctly or not) that "poisoning of general social norms, discourse, and institutions by the ideological warfare" is exactly Elon's goal. Many aren't even worried about politics or ideology per se, so much as the stability of the platform going forward and their ability to maintain an audience.
I have yet to see an actual post on Twitter which laments any loss of political control over the platform, although it's a big platform so I could have missed it, and that can just be a bad-faith interpretation of goal 1 anyway.
I honestly don't give a fig about Elon or twitter. I was simply noting my opinion that having ideological ghettos ("siloed echo chambers") may not be such a bad thing, all things considered, since there is little pretense of actual dialogue to inform and/or reach consensus on these flat social spaces.
Isolated echo chambers may be an improvement, overall.
What's toxic about flat social spaces is that conversations gets reduced to fights between the most vocal, thoughtless, or aggressive holders of opinion X and !X. And this influences the acceptable modes of social behavior. It leaks to real life and institutions. It is corrosive.
First assumption made is that echo chambers do not exist in twitter. This seems to be based on a somewhat patronizing view of humanity that excludes the possibility of willful affinity and choice by the individual, and posits an environmental basis for opinion formation. You can easily dissuade yourself of this by picking a hot divisive topic, choose your side, and follow tweets. You will be in an echo chamber on Twitter.
So I propose we consider the two distinct goals that seem to get conflated in these discussions:
Goal 1: promote uniformity of acceptable opinion du jour.
Goal 2: prevent the poisoning of general social norms, discourse, and institutions by the ideological warfare on social networks.
The latter goal 2 appeals to my sensibilities. And post Elon acquisition, most seem to be lamenting the loss of political control over Twitter (goal 1).