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The “Echo Chamber” Reverb

May 25th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.

The infamous “Echo Chamber”. If you have a blog that concentrates on any topic regarding the web, you are pretty much right in the center of it. It is a term you hear a lot out of the valley. For example, Fred Wilson has 19 different blog posts where he uses the term. My personal favorite is from his post, Outside the Echo Chamber, where he describes his encounter with a typical American:

Our driver said, “why is it that Google is so much better than Yahoo when they are both owned by the same company”.

That type of comment really makes one think. It is challenging to keep perspective about the views of the web outside the “echo chamber” when we are so involved in the web, the innovation taking place around us and the great solutions. As Geoffrey Moore would classify us, we are the innovators and we are the early adopters; there are whole other classes of people AFTER the chasm.

And on that point, does the average person actually care about Twitter? Well, I can’t say that I do either, I haven’t been able to relate to the hype (Renee Blodgett is with on this) so I would welcome some enlightenment about it. But overall, we should understand how the reverb affects us, our immersion in OUR own immersion.

But then again, for every comment like the one above, I get pleasantly surprised by others. Like when my uncle who is trying to price his house said “well, I guess I’ll check out the other houses in my neighborhood on Zillow“.

Other coverage and resource on the Echo Chamber:

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  • http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/ Stephen Smoliar

    Forget about Twitter! Does the average person care about the Web? (If he’s your uncle, Lou, he probably is not “average!”) Last March I put up a post about the National Technology Scan:
    http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/03/rest-of-country.html
    Reuters ran their report under the headline: “Many Americans see little point to Web: survey.” My post includes a link to the Reuters story; and it is still there (I just checked). Even in a world that changes at “Internet speed,” I suspect that most of the observations I reported have not yet gone obsolete!

  • http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/ Stephen Smoliar

    Forget about Twitter! Does the average person care about the Web? (If he’s your uncle, Lou, he probably is not “average!”) Last March I put up a post about the National Technology Scan:

    http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/03/rest-of-country.html

    Reuters ran their report under the headline: “Many Americans see little point to Web: survey.” My post includes a link to the Reuters story; and it is still there (I just checked). Even in a world that changes at “Internet speed,” I suspect that most of the observations I reported have not yet gone obsolete!

  • http://correlate.wordpress.com Lou Paglia

    Great find. The Reuters article certainly substantiates both your and my post. As much as those inside the echo chamber feel life is not fulfilled without unloading that knick-knack on eBay or having the books sent directly to you from Amazon (this isn’t even getting into the 2.0 stuff), there are a multitude of others that simply go about their lives without the web. How people still do their banking without online banking is beyond me. But I guess there is probably a large contingent that would call us all crazy for managing our finances without the help of a teller.

  • http://correlate.wordpress.com Lou Paglia

    Great find. The Reuters article certainly substantiates both your and my post. As much as those inside the echo chamber feel life is not fulfilled without unloading that knick-knack on eBay or having the books sent directly to you from Amazon (this isn’t even getting into the 2.0 stuff), there are a multitude of others that simply go about their lives without the web. How people still do their banking without online banking is beyond me. But I guess there is probably a large contingent that would call us all crazy for managing our finances without the help of a teller.

  • http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/ Stephen Smoliar

    Lou, I was glad to see you broaden the conversation to that more general question of the fulfilled life, because you reminded me of one of my other favorite themes. Let me pose the proposition that the echo is nothing more than a cheap (and thoroughly ineffective) imitation of self-reflection, that process by which life becomes worth living through our capacity for examining it (twisting around the words the Plato put into Socrates’ mouth). (In this respect I am fascinated by that Greek culture that could spin a myth around the fates of Echo and Narcissus and the sad result of their encounter.) I first tried to explore this in a blog post that I titled “A World Without Reflection:”
    http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-without-reflection.html
    You have reminded me that what is actually happening is that we have rejected the “mirror of the mind” in favor of the “mirror of the image.”

  • http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/ Stephen Smoliar

    Lou, I was glad to see you broaden the conversation to that more general question of the fulfilled life, because you reminded me of one of my other favorite themes. Let me pose the proposition that the echo is nothing more than a cheap (and thoroughly ineffective) imitation of self-reflection, that process by which life becomes worth living through our capacity for examining it (twisting around the words the Plato put into Socrates’ mouth). (In this respect I am fascinated by that Greek culture that could spin a myth around the fates of Echo and Narcissus and the sad result of their encounter.) I first tried to explore this in a blog post that I titled “A World Without Reflection:”

    http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-without-reflection.html

    You have reminded me that what is actually happening is that we have rejected the “mirror of the mind” in favor of the “mirror of the image.”

  • http://correlate.wordpress.com Lou Paglia

    We certainly have to concentrate to take the time to reflect on the information coming out way, a growing challenge. I find myself having to consciously shift between power reading to absorbing/reflecting when organizing my thoughts for a post. That is one simple example of what you describe above and in your post.

  • http://correlate.wordpress.com Lou Paglia

    We certainly have to concentrate to take the time to reflect on the information coming out way, a growing challenge. I find myself having to consciously shift between power reading to absorbing/reflecting when organizing my thoughts for a post. That is one simple example of what you describe above and in your post.

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