by Michael Quinn Sullivan
We all live in echo chambers; the only questions are how big that chamber is and what sounds are bouncing about.
The echo chambers of life are unavoidable and not necessarily bad. Our friends, family, and coworkers will almost inevitably reflect variations of ourselves. In their best expression, like an old cathedral, our individual and shaky voices can add together in a beautiful chorus.
In the past, when our physical life, spiritual life, and thought life were somewhat geographically confined, we had to learn how to bring those discordant tones together. Even people with whom we disagreed on one point or many were still an integral part of our social circle, so the ability to challenge each other agreeably was a necessity inside that chamber.
But in the 21st century, the echo chamber of life has moved online. In doing so, it has taken on a peculiar reverberation. With social media, those echo chambers have become isolated pockets of radicalized opinion. It is too easy for us to muffle challenging voices and gravitate to those who tickle our ears.
Those we follow, those we block, and the back-and-forth we observe on that rectangular piece of glass and electronic circuitry scream volumes about what we believe. Or, perhaps more importantly, what we are being primed to believe in the future.
Our interconnected world means that we must be wary of confining our thought life in too small an echo chamber. The bigger the chamber, the better view we can have of reality.
While X, Reddit, Facebook, and TikTok can all be fun distractions, their algorithms are designed to pull us in by showing us more of what we have already liked. It’s one thing when the subject is funny cat videos; something else entirely when it is the deification of secular ideologies.
In 2022, researchers created simulated accounts for 13-year-olds on TikTok and watched the “For You” recommendations fed to them. Suicide-related content appeared within 3 minutes; eating disorder content within 8. Other studies found pornography, Islamic radicalization, and other destabilizing content within minutes of accounts being created.
The echo chambers are killing our souls. This is not a screed against social media, but rather an urgent plea for us as adults to, by example, shift our eyes away from screens and into the real world.
But even in the real world, we must recheck the fragility of egos and the self-created, industrial-scale anxieties treated as virtues that have ripped apart families in the name of going “no-contact.”
A friend recently recommended a strategic approach to keeping a proper balance. He suggested that the five peers we spend the most time around should share our values and point us toward, or pull us closer to, whom we hope to become in Christ. Each ring out should include more people who don’t share all our values, but we can relate to or bond with on some level.
We each need fewer echoey distractions that push us inward, and more challenging conversations that build us upward.
