Merry Christmas! 2017 has been an incredible year for the ECC and for me personally. I hope that you don’t mind me using this last newsletter of the year to give you a small update on where we’re at and where we would like to go.
This year I worked with the excellent Tom Steinberg to figure out where the Echo Chamber Club wants to go. Here is our mission and our goals.
Mission: To help our subscribers access ideas from outside their usual media sources, in order to make empathetic choices that draw upon many voices and promote innovative thinking.
Goal 1 – To educate. We would like to educate ourselves (and our subscribers) about the harm that echo chambers cause and how they exist. We want to give our subscribers the mechanisms for breaking out of echo chambers.
Goal 2 – To develop a culture of empathetic decision making amongst leaders and influencers. Empathetic decision making only comes through considering diverse choices.
Goal 3 – To grow the amount of original intellectual thought that paints a positive vision about how we can live together in the modern world.
You may be aware that I’m currently studying at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University with an aim to understand what echo chambers actually are and how we can improve our access to information using the internet. It may surprise you to hear that there isn’t yet a robust theory of what echo chambers are. It’s my intention in the next 7 months to ground a new echo chamber theory in the social psychology theories of ‘political homophily’, from the mid 20th century and update this theory in light of individual and community identity in an internet age. This way, I hope that echo chambers will not just be seen as a ‘literary analogy’, but instead as an entity where we can make policy decisions on the architecture of the internet.
When it comes to the rest of our objectives, I’m limited by the time that I have. I would love to be able to get some help from a marketing agency (or similar) to help grow the Echo Chamber Club. For this, I’d either need pro bono work from an agency (please do get in touch if you would like to provide this), or money and funds so I can grow the ECC myself. I’m more than happy to do talks or consultancy to try and make this money, so please let me know if this is of interest. Or please let me know if you’d like to sponsor the ECC on a corporate or individual basis.
A small way to help this Christmas is to share the Echo Chamber Club with your friends, family or colleagues, especially if they like the objectives!
Thank you so much for your support this year and I’m looking forward to the next 12 months!
Alice
P.S. We’re taking a break for the next 2 weekends so we’ll be back on 14th January. If you’d like to curate a newsletter for the ECC please let me know here.
