Aliosha Barranco Lopez, Bowdoin’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy, shares insights from her research in an opinion piece for the Bangor Daily News.
In it Barranco Lopez explores the dangers echo chambers pose in that they make impossible the ability to have rational debates about policy making.
An excerpt:
How can they resist changing their minds even after receiving conclusive evidence that they were wrong? I think the answer to this question is that echo chambers are not simply communities with strict relations of trust and distrust. They are, also, places where our identities are transformed in ways that make it virtually impossible for us to change our minds. People in online echo chambers acquire a number of new beliefs about what type of persons they and others in their group are. A QAnon follower, for example, thinks about herself as part of the group of people who get things right, and those who are not part of that group are people who get things wrong.
Read “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Shows the Real Danger of Echo Chambers” in the Bangor Daily News.
