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People keep assuming that echo chambers can only exist on the political extremes. *There is no relationship between the structure of an echo chamber and the political content*.
Centrists can systematically distrust all political extremes - and so be in an echo chamber.
Centrists can systematically distrust all political extremes - and so be in an echo chamber.
I'm not saying that "all centrists are in an echo chamber." I'm saying that: if you believe my view that echo chambers are structures where members have been brought to distrust all non-members, then that structure can exist anywhere on the political spectrum.
This is related to my and @ETVPod's discussion about how people often want to use my and Bekka's analysis of "moral outrage porn" to implicate only the political extremes. But moral outrage porn is, again, just as possible in the center. @ETVPod called it "civility porn".
It's just as possible to use your morality for pleasure anywhere on the political spectrum. What that looks like in the center is, say: smug dismissal of all those "radicals" as silly, done for the sake of the pleasure of smugness.
This is not to say that everybody with any political stance is in an echo chamber, or porn-ifying their morality.
It's to say: you're not safe from this worry if you stand in the center. Cheap morality is possible across the political spectrum.
It's to say: you're not safe from this worry if you stand in the center. Cheap morality is possible across the political spectrum.
(These comments occur against the background my analysis of echo chambers as trust-manipulators, rather than engines of omission and filtration) https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult
(And against the backdrop of Bekka and my analysis of moral outrage porn) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/opinion/sunday/porn.html
(And @ETVPod and my discussion of civility porn is here:) https://voidpod.com/podcasts/2019/6/19/ev-094-echoes-in-the-void-with-c-thi-nguyen
