The Dangers of the Internet Echo Chamber
Hmm, I was listening to Radio1 the other day and began to realise how few records by current pop people I’d actually ever heard. I heard my first Kate Nash song about three days ago. I know this isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but I could barely name the charts at the moment. I know virtually no music I don’t actively go an seek out. It sounds harmless, but it is a worrying trend, I think.
With virtually all things at the moment, from religious and political debate right through to more trivial things like music, it is becoming easier and easier to refuse to expose yourself to people you disagree with. This is really, really bad news not least because it tends to lead people into an echo chamber that is full of people who only ever tell them that they are right.
How are you supposed to know what you think if you are never challenged on it, never contradicted, never forced to defend your arguments? If you are never exposed to people who disagree with you and can actually out-debate you? What does it do to your convictions if you are out-argued on a point of, say, political ethics by someone else? Well increasingly this is something people just don’t ever have to find out.
I know that as you get older you tend to become more and more entrenched in your beliefs of all kinds, and I know that to a large extent this isn’t just narrow-mindedness it’s what you really think. But in so many ways the fact that we are gathering into communities, particularly online, of exclusively like-minded souls is bad for us. It leads to religious people thinking that Darwin’s theory of evolution is anti-god. Indie kids assuming that all hip-hop is by definition shit. Football fans having no way of disagreeing with one another without it getting aggressive.
Basically, it leads to people plucking their ideas from a very, very small pool and having an inflated sense of their own rightness. That’s not how we learn. We learn from being exposed to new things, things we don’t understand, and trying to come to terms with how they affect our world-view.
In a musical sense it can lead to drifting completely into a single niche and having no idea that, for example, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is not a bad song, despite being a Kylie number. More importantly, it leads to a lack of appreciation of context: of the world into which a song is born. Punk was a revolution not just for being great music, but because it blew away the stodgy pretension of the status quo. If you don’t understand the context of the group, how good do you think the Sex Pistols were?
So I am making a conscious effort to break out of my comfort zone a bit more.
Here are some more songs I got from the splendid Comes With a Smile a few years ago:
Jim White – Cinderblock Walls
Unbunny – Water & the Spanish Tongue (Alternate Version)
Jim Guthrie – Ain’t Got No/I Got Life
Giant Sand – Capitulation Blues
Working now?
Huzzah!
Remember the lesson of Take That… Well, I suppose you’re right, but after all it’s a natural enough impulse to want to share some time with like-minded people, particularly when one spends one’s workaday life in the presence of silly twats.
When it comes to music, I think the artists themselves (or at least the record companies) contribute to the problem in the way they develop and market music. It’s all about target demographics and product placement (remember Fergie and her shoes?). When music is consciously being manufactured like a widget to be used as the platform for the launching of some vapid celebrity “image,” it inevitably comes to be identified with the cultural vacuum that produced it. Even if the music might have some merit in its own right, listening to it triggers a defensive response because of what it represents.
In politics and ethics I absolutely agree with you that contradiction is the stuff of growth. Having said that, Darwinism is anti-god in several very important ways. And very right, too.
Whilst it’s true that the record companies do it to us/themselves to a fair degree, we know where the ‘other’ stuff is if we want to go and look for it. I just find I do this far less than I should.
I am not starting on Darwin and God though, because that rant could go on for days before I even paused for breath.
here’s a thought–is there a meaningful difference between the people who blindly accept whatever the music industry decides to spoon-feed them by way of the commercial radio waves–limited playlists, repetition, pr-blasts to promote the bands, etc.–and those of us who actively seek out the kind of music we most enjoy, even if that means we pretty much limit ourselves to what we already know we like?
i’ve thought about this before, not quite at the same level as you, but i have vowed to myself to try to expand my circle of music. i think it’s really a matter of balancing being true to yourself and not trying new things “just” because you think you ought to while at the same time doing what you suggest and stepping out of your comfort zone. you never know what you’ll find and what will speak to you if you don’t try.
same goes for the rest of life. i have a friend who says you can learn something from anyone as long as you leave yourself open to the experience. you may not learn a new fact or have your mind changed, but you might learn something about yourself and why you think a certain way, which, as you say, can be just as valuable.
actually, i find that as i get older i’m much more inclined to “allow” people to have different beliefs than i did when i was younger. i find i’m much less sure about how the world functions than i used to be.