Is this a passage out of the ‘echo chamber’?
When Lake Superior State University went looking last year for its annual list of words or phrases to ban, the top suggestion was “echo chamber.”
There’s something oddly fitting about this. “Echo chamber” describes a phenomenon in which people surround themselves with only opinions similar to their own — blocking out all those who differ or disagree with them.
So here’s what happened in late 2016: hundreds of people told Lake Superior State University that they were annoyed by the phrase “echo chamber” and thus, it should be banned. Notice something? Yes, that’s sort of how echo chambers happen.
Last week’s special Insight column on “The Age of Unreason” also dealt with this phenomenon of selective opinion-seeking (without using the phrase, which should make the would-be banishers happy).
Edward Keenan, in his piece, recounted some research that showed just how averse people have become to hearing differing viewpoints. Some rated the prospect as welcome as having a tooth pulled.
Keenan also talked about the notion in terms of “confirmation bias” and “motivated reasoning.”
“Studies show, again and again over a period of years, people seek out and believe information that aligns with what they already believe and disbelieve or avoid any information that contradicts those beliefs,” he wrote.
Many of the chief symptoms of the Age of Unreason — polarization, hyperpartisanship, emotional salesmanship — also thrive in echo chambers. If we’re trying to get past this unhelpful age in our democracy, then, we have to start coming up with programs or policies to get people out of their safe, disagreement-free zones.
The best one I’ve heard recently comes from Yaroslav Baran, now at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, formerly a Conservative staffer.
Baran would like to see a political party — any or all parties, really — become champions for the idea of “executive exchange” between businesses or workplaces that often tend to be adversarial. It doesn’t have to be executives, though — it could be any program that urges employees, new ones or veterans, to get some exposure to workplaces they may see as unfriendly territory.
He explains: “Currently, media think government is always hiding something; government thinks media is out to get them; public servants think government is a bunch of yahoo kids; political types often see public servants as lazy or passive-aggressive. Business thinks government is out of touch with reality.”
What if people in these businesses were encouraged to do some time in the sectors they disparage?
“By fostering programs where future leaders walk in each other’s shoes, live each other’s experiences, and interact from the inside with their own sector,” Baran suggests, “it would melt away that mutual misunderstanding.”
He points out that it’s also the opposite of the rhetoric that became common during the Conservatives’ decade in power, with all the talk of “shutting the revolving door” between the private and public sectors. Stephen Harper’s first piece of legislation, we’ll remember, was the Accountability Act, which imposed a five-year ban on anyone leaving publicoffice careers to deal with government in the private sector.
That ban still exists under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government and it remains a major disincentive to anyone thinking of making a move from the private to public sector, or vice-versa.
While it’s true that Finance Minister Bill Morneau did come to government from Bay Street, for instance, it’s not likely that he could recruit many of his old colleagues to come and join him in public service. Some of them are no doubt dissuaded, too, not just by the accountability-act ban, but by how politics has increasingly been demonizing the corporate sector since the economic crash of 2008. That’s a whole other conversation about isolated, polarized worlds — income and wealth, mainly.
Back when I first arrived in Ottawa as a reporter in the late 1980s, I did a series of stories on how employment grants were being handed out across the country. The then deputy minister of employment, a man named Arthur Kroeger, phoned me up and invited me to come and spend a couple of days in the department, seeing how things work. I did, and it gave me a new appreciation for how decisions were made.
Would that happen today? Probably not. Public servants talk to journalists primarily through carefully managed messages and reporters lack the time or the access to get more than the line of the day (or the hour) from inside government.
Rather than banning the phrase “echo chambers,” what we need, it seems, is a way to break down the barriers between people who disagree with each other. It may come through some type of careerexchange program, or simply a decision to stop banning ideas we don’t like. sdelacourt@bell.net