The web is full of different shades of thinking, but they rarely mix meaningfully Shutterstock

The internet glosses over life's ambiguities with false certainty, and we do little to search out these important grey areas

By rights, the internet should be doing more than anything else to open our eyes to new perspectives and experiences. We're moving away from that: as the web becomes increasingly tailored to the individual, we're more likely than ever to be served personalised content that makes us happy and keeps us clicking. That happy content is seldom anything that challenges our viewpoint, and there's a risk that this distorts our view of the wider world outside our browser.


On the surface of it, personalisation has had a positive effect on the way the internet works both for advertisers who target products at us, and for consumers, who enjoy the finely honed free content that's funded by the effective advertising: everybody wins.

If you use the internet reasonably regularly, you will have seen examples of this, some more subtle than others: Netflix pushes films and shows based on your viewing habits, Twitter will suggest who you might like to follow by cross checking who your peers are, and as Eli Pariser's "Filter Bubble" TED Talk demonstrates, Google will offer dramatically different search results based on a bunch of factors, even if you're not logged in. Facebook's algorithm works overtime, tailoring your newsfeed based on who you routinely interact with, and it's far from perfect. Regularly like or comment on someone's statuses?

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They'll pop up all the time, no matter whether they've just made a sandwich or won the lottery. Someone you tend to ignore will get brushed under the carpet -- sometimes for major life events, like the birth of a child or their imminent wedding.

Highlighting a dissenting voice as trolling assumes that this voice is so outrageous that it can't be genuine, and the orthodoxy of the community continues unchallenged


Superficially, perfecting this is a good thing. Afterall, who doesn't want to be surrounded by like-minded people and sheltered from aspects of life they'd rather avoid, be it irritating friends they added on Facebook to avoid social embarrassment, or articles that make them angry? The trouble is that by accepting this personalisation, we're insulating ourselves from viewpoints that differ from our own, inadvertently reinforcing our view of the world, and closing our minds to new ideas and experiences.

The premise of the echo-chamber effect is simple, although there has been little academic study into it: if you surround yourself with voices that echo similar opinions to those you're feeding out, they will be reinforced in your mind as mainstream, to the point that it can distort your perception of what is the general consensus. Graham Jones, an internet psychologist tells me that if the echo-chamber effect exists, it's part of social constructivism and how we shape the world around us differently from others for all kinds of reasons: "There is some evidence, for instance, that people who speak different languages actually do construct the world around them slightly differently... So, the echo-chamber effect is part of what I would expect as a psychologist -- as like-minded people get together, they tend to shape their version of the world according to what they are talking about and hence it inevitably becomes biased."

This bias could be anywhere, from forums devoted to conspiracy theories to the rivalry between Apple and Android fans, but it's most obvious in the world of traditional journalism, where newspapers make no secret of their political affiliations, or that of their readership. A cursory glance at the comments under a

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Telegraph and Guardian article covering exactly the same topic will show a distinct contrast of opinion as you'd expect, but users crossing the political divide to comment against the host's cultural thought are often dismissed as "trolls". We have reached the stage where someone offering a contrasting opinion is viewed as deliberately trying to wind up others. Ironically, highlighting a dissenting voice as "trolling" is another possible example of the echo-chamber effect in action: it's assumed that this voice is so outrageous that it can't be genuine, and the orthodoxy of the community continues unchallenged.


Tom Stewart, chartered psychologist and founder of System Concepts, tells me it's "very, very difficult to reverse entrenched views". When I suggest to him that the way the internet is going makes countering this more of a challenge, he refers to Leon Festinger's legendary research into cognitive dissonance, which showed, amongst other things, that people would look to actively seek out reassuring voices in order to confirm their beliefs and resolve their internal conflict. This is clearly something the internet makes incredibly easy, without geographical blockers in place. Anecdotally, Stewart believes that exposure to differing moderate views is more effective at opening the mind up than extremes, but on the occasions that we do have our views challenged online, it tends not to be in an extreme manner which actually reinforces the polarisation.

To take an example that occurs reasonably often: The Daily Mail publishes a right wing story that appeals to its own echo-chamber of right wing readers. This article is spread around

Twitter's own effective left wing echo-chamber. The result of this is usually an influx of outside voices invading the right wing echo chamber with extreme opposite responses, causing each party to retreat within their own personal echo chamber for reassurance.

Rather than changing minds, the outcome is a stubborn refusal to engage on both sides, especially as online anonymity tends to make people, to put it mildly, less reserved in their feisty argumentativeness.


Is it that big a deal? Jones doesn't believe that online networks are any more of an echo-chamber than a user's real life networks. Although explaining that being cut off from dissenting perspectives is how cults have historically operated, currently people "can find other viewpoints much more quickly than they might otherwise have done in the 'real world'," should they want to. But Jones accepts that the internet's current trend of personalisation and filtering content on our behalf at least has the potential to "bias thinking".

So, what is the best way of keeping an open mind online? Making a conscious effort to seek out views that challenge your own can be a uncomfortable, and the internet usually disguises that there's any personalisation going on. Taking your news and opinion from a wide array of sources is certainly a start, as is looking for sites that amalgamate news rather than curate their own content with the inherent biases that implies. With social networks, following people outside your comfort zone can certainly open your eyes to a wider world view, though it's easier done on Twitter than Facebook, where personalisation is intertwined with the way it works. Google also allows you to opt out of personalised search, if you dig deep enough. Perhaps the best way though is to directly counter your instincts: click on links you may not like, and read the comments.

Talking to various psychologists for the purposes of this article highlighted something rarely seen in online echo chambers: that there is plenty of ambiguity in life that the internet has a tendency to gloss over with false certainty, and it's always worth actively seeking these grey areas out, even if that doesn't feel as instantly gratifying as accepting an algorithm's increasingly accurate instincts about you.