As embarrassing as it is to admit, it was an episode of The Partridge Family that I watched as a child (by then long in syndication) that first introduced me to the perils of The Echo Chamber. In This is My Song, the 10-year-old Danny explores his own stirrings as an aspiring songwriter, eager to prove his abilities and save his family from a dry spell of new material. As he drifts off to sleep one night, he overhears older brother Keith (the de facto family songwriter played by teen heart-throb David Cassidy) in the adjacent bedroom rehearsing a song that has come to him in a sudden flash of inspiration. The next morning, Danny previews his new song to the family, having inadvertently appropriated Keith’s melody as his own. Accusations fly, sibling rivalry ignites, chaos ensues. 

It’s a no-duh that we’re largely influenced by the context in which we live. But as someone whose formative years occurred in the late ’80s/early ’90s, my context wasn’t all that much bigger than the Partridge family home on the Warner Brothers lot. For the most part, my life occurred within narrow geographical boundaries of the physical world, whether that meant meeting friends for late-night rendezvous at Denny’s, making unsanctioned trips to clubs, or simply hanging out on my friend Josh’s waterbed. It wasn’t that we weren’t influenced by media—we spent hours trying to unravel the cryptic plot lines of Twin Peaks, making mixed tapes of our favorite bands, and worrying that Operation Desert Storm would kindle the third World War. It’s just that our enculturation was informed largely by the social contexts in which these events and experiences were discussed. 

Today, as our leisure time migrates online, our contexts have become increasingly defined by our internet activity, be they web trawls, peer-to-peer networking, or media consumption. A MacArthur study conducted in 2008 determined that teen interaction with digital media is motivated primarily by one of two distinct factors: friendship or interest. While friendship-driven engagement is described as socializing online with friends in one’s local peer group, interest-driven behavior involves consuming information and connecting with communities not otherwise present in one’s offline context. What would have previously required a plane ticket, a passport, and an introduction is now enabled by a mere internet connection. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Twitterverse, where the need for an introduction (and attendant social anxiety) is eliminated entirely. A recent study cited that only 22.1% of all Twitter relationships are reciprocal, reinforcing the idea that most relationships aren’t inherently personal in nature, but rather interest-based. Celebrities, brands, and media entities aside, the users with the largest followings are seen to have a particular perspective or domain expertise. Take @shitmydadsays, for instance, who pretty much corners the market for curmudgeony 74-year-old man-speak.

Over the past 6 months, Twitter has introduced several new features, Who to Follow, Similar to You, and Connections. Based on algorithms similar to those used by Facebook and LinkedIn, all three features either recommend or highlight Twitter users commonly followed by those within your network—the logic being that if three users you’re following are all following a particular user, you should be too. I’ll be the first person to admit I’ve been susceptible to this, but lately, I’ve begun to wonder about this logic. Facebook and LinkedIn are both social networking sites that allow us to maintain contact with our personal connections, either for social fulfillment, or, ostensibly, professional gain. In this regard, a suggestion-based algorithm works to our advantage—making it easier for us to find and reestablish communication with lost contacts. In contrast, the mechanics of Twitter (broadcasting short-form texts that are publicly visible by default) make it inherently less useful as a means of meaningful one-on-one exchange with those within our social networks, but advantageous as a tool for both consuming and sharing content with broader appeal. The value of that content is often measured by its relevancy, timing, or rarity, so by electing to also follow the users those within our network are following, we’re, in effect, creating our own echo chamber of influence. 

Generally speaking, Twitter users are discriminating about the content we deem worthy of sharing. We act as editors, filtering our own feeds and vouching for content via the re-tweeting function; an RT is as much a personal stamp of approval and a signaling function as it is a means of sharing. And in today’s complex world in which we are relentlessly inundated with information, we find ourselves ever more reliant upon others to help tee up our inputs. It seems that content curation is becoming just as—if not more—important than content creation. And regardless of the criteria, the loudest voices in the room aren’t randomly assigned; we hand them the microphone.  

A study published in 2009 compared the media consumption habits and cultural and political attitudes of viewers across six countries. Researchers concluded that we watch the news more for affirmation than for information, most frequently choosing media outlets that substantiate our pre-existing world views over others that present perspectives incongruent to our own. This type of intellectual complacency has far-reaching implications for how our understanding of the world is shaped, and platforms like Twitter only add fuel to the fire by propagating the rapid spread of ideas. Ultimately, in absence of diversity among our inputs, we run the risk of resurrecting our own Partridge family home of paper-thin walls—one that doesn’t reside on a studio lot in Burbank, but rather, is built upon a placeless foundation of overlapping interests and redundant points of view.