Regardless of where you lie on the political spectrum, I can tell you with 100% certainty that you have experienced the echo chamber effect. Echo chambers are nothing new, but have undeniably increased their prevalence in the last few decades. Of course, we can blame the usual suspects - the news, social media, the internet - but this doesn’t change the fact that echo chambers exist and prevent discourse from happening freely. While we all may think we’re immune to these echo chambers - we’re not. Bias is an inevitable (and natural) part of the way we process knowledge and information but that doesn’t mean we should just tolerate it - adopting the whole, ‘everyone’s biased but me’ mentality is all too common. We as people are incentivised to keep the peace and ignore the echo chamber but echo chambers are dangerous, and we must address them, starting here at UWC.
Firstly - what are echo chambers? Literally speaking, they’re closed spaces in which sound reverberates. As the name suggests, knowledge and information get passed back and forth within a group of people, and much like echos, are simply a repetition of what another person has said. The issue with echo chambers is that there is no opening for different points of view because when you’re surrounded by people with the same mindset, nobody has the incentive to question it.
Why do echo chambers even occur in the first place? To put it simply - people like having their feelings affirmed and their opinions validated. It’s so easy to like someone who agrees with you, and you subconsciously view that person as smarter when they have the same mindset as you. In the same way, we unfollow people on Instagram when their content starts to lose its entertainment factor, we tend to drift away from people that don’t share our thoughts after a period of time. But what is the line where this becomes acceptable? Can we spend our whole lives running away from people just because they may think differently?
I think this brings up this important idea of objectivity regarding truth. At the risk of sounding too much like my TOK homework, we can’t really articulate what knowledge and information are, in the sense that, we don’t know who’s objectively right and objectively wrong, because not everything is objective. We are human, and we experience biases, and that influences the way that we process information - which is why there’s no black and white when it comes to things like politics and philosophy. I am not thinking the ‘right’ way and you are not thinking the ‘wrong’ way, because there is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to think.
It’s no secret that UWC aligns itself left on the political spectrum and this is reflected by a large part of the student body. The thing is, I’m not sure whether this is causation or correlation - does UWC influence the mindset of its student body, or are students attracted to a school that shares their political standings? The UWC echo chamber occurs because, although we are supposed to have forums for discourse, people still are not willing to talk about other perspectives. I feel like at this school, people argue with one another, but they’re all on the same side, arguing for the same thing. This is not to say that we don’t have people of diverse backgrounds and opinions, actually, it’s quite the opposite, it’s just to question why don’t we hear more of these diverse opinions on a daily. I think that the issue with this is that as we can see from historical events when we do things like this, it can often lead to radicalisation, which is why often at UWC you see extreme political opinions, and hardly ever the moderate ones.
But moreover, I think this echo chamber actually extends beyond politics, and more importantly, has to do with academics. I don’t think I can fully articulate just how annoying it is to always (and I mean always) have someone on your case about your grades. Someone questioning your subject package, someone questioning your test scores, someone asking you where you’re applying. Because this echo chamber fosters this environment where it’s impossible just to exist, without having some ‘tryhard’ come up and demand to know every intimate detail about your academics. The echo chamber also makes it seem okay to do these things, but if you were in another environment, you would realise just how strange it is to have people entitled to your information. There’s this echo chamber where all I hear are the words, “predicted grades”, “hell term”, “internals” and “IAs”, and all I hear is how hard IB is, and how much effort I have to put in. Because yes, I get it, IB is difficult and we need to work hard to succeed, but I really don’t have to be reminded of this on a daily basis, and I certainly don’t need to be reminded of this by someone who’s literally my age. The issue of growing up in this pressure cooker is that after a while it gets so exhausting to listen to the same people tell you the same things, especially since you may wonder what makes these teenagers the authority to tell you what to do anyway.
Whatever form you view it in, UWC does have an echo chamber. And sure, echo chambers are not something unique to our school, and you will find them wherever you go, but I feel that as I (and many others) get older, we become more cognizant of the fact that sometimes it does feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again. Sorry if this was too ‘TOK-y’ for you, but hopefully you become more aware of the conversations you engage in at school, and maybe, just maybe, try playing devil’s advocate.
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