Some time during the last Presidential election, at a friend’s summer home, there was a classic Laska conversation – white, male, romantic about industrial economies, and defensive.  There were three of us:  the friend, a very successful, affluent businessman who had advanced beyond his working class family; the friend’s brother, an affable, genuine guy who stayed working class and struggled; and me, less affluent, undeniably privileged, from a professional family in a working class town, but also declasse from my father’s death just as I was entering my teens.  I like to think Orwell would have found it rich.

The brother expressed the simple sentiment that liberals think working class people are dumb (familiar theme from me, I know, but I think I’m going somewhere).  As evidence he mentioned Clinton’s famous campaign line, the last in the campaign haiku:  “It’s the economy, stupid.”  It had never occurred to me or my friend that this comment was directed at voters, or a campaign line, or could be construed as judgment of Republican voters.  I had always assumed that this was Clinton talking to Bush, Democratic politicians talking to Republican ones.  Short of that, or in addition, I would sometimes read, “stupid” as “duh” – do we really need to be reminded that the economy is the issue?  Duh!  It was a surprising demonstration of how insider talk could become part of a voter’s thought process.

Fast forward to a talk by one of the people who is credited with helping facilitate the Arab Spring, Wael Ghonim (more here).  Ghonim created the Facebook pages and, with the skills of a Google employee, helped create other tools that were at the center of the “We are all Khaled Saeed” spark behind the protests in Egypt.  He has since become an observer and critic of the digital civic space as he continues his activism.  One of his slides at his Personal Democracy Forum talk, was a revelation:

In the last 4 – 6 years, people concerned about politics and civic space have been unpacking algorithms, market forces, business models, and what they do to public discourse.  Ghonim’s argument – simple to the point of duh, but to me profound – is that likes and comments reflect engagement and are leading indicators of generating clicks and views, the profit engine of the social realm – and they are shaping our civic space more powerfully than we know.

On the left, Ghonim says lots of likes indicate an echo chamber.  In human terms, these are posts where like-minded people get together and say preach, pat each other on the back, and tut-tut people on the outside.   It can turn into “micro-climates of virtue” to use Thomas Frank’s phrase, or simply be a place where you feel sane when the world around you doesn’t get it.  But it is an echo chamber.

On the right side of the chart, Ghonim indicates thats loads of comments (with few likes) are usually signs of flame wars – people hashing out disagreements, trying to be heard, mildly trolling each other.  In the middle is the unprofitable space of productive discussions – low traffic, low clicks, low signal for monetization.  Facebook and social networks don’t make money on that middle, even though that middle is what a democracy needs.

All of that was very interesting, powerful even, but for this post, I want to look at the echo chamber.  Let’s go back to the “stupid” conversation above.  That thought process occurred because an echo chamber – what people were saying to each other, in code, and for reinforcement – was made public (this may be the first time a campaign’s inner working were so public during the campaign?).  The echo chamber, insider talk (and I realize I may be incorrectly conflating there) became, effectively an unintentional advertisement of the cause.  Subtle difference.  A paid commercial says loudly and widely “this is what we are”.  The indirect transmission of echo chamber talk says loudly and widely “this is what they are.”

From 2012, we have memeified, virally transmitted, echo chamber moments IRL or from the meatspace: the 47% comment from Romney; the “cling to their guns” moment from Obama.  Today, in the digital space, where some social graphs include a wide range of political friendships, we have public, and polarizing echo chambers that further divide and fragment our political conversations.  Picture echo chamber activity happening today on Facebook:

They’re being shared mostly because they are funny, not because they advance conversation.  They are essentially reassuring, grounding echo chamber bits.  People will put likes and laughs under them.  People will also start to put comments of frustration about why there isn’t progress on the issues and those comments will invariably turn into two minutes hate of the people on the other side.  When they don’t turn into flame wars, they are viewable, public echo chambers.  People on the other side, or people who are on your side, but culturally distant, will scan the energy, sarcasm, and judgment in the echo chamber made public, and now they’re polarized.  “This is what they are”… and they don’t think much of you.

Phew, that took a while, but I think there’s a there there that helps explain why 2016 is markedly different from 2012 and 2008, even though 2008 was the original Facebook election.  In our conversation about how votes are formed, in particular CVFD’s comment that simply liking someone has to come into play, these polarizing, public echo chambers are something new to account for.