Is the internet an echo chamber where people only gather to hear what they want to hear? That's the charge of some mass media folk in putting down blogs and internet opinions.
David Weinberger challenges this echo charge on his tech blog Corante:
The echo chamber meme distracts us from the true echo chamber: The constellation of media, especially in the US. The Internet as a whole, presents the broadest range of opinion, belief, feeling and creativity in the history of civilization. If you are not on the Net, you are limited to a diminishing selection of outlets expressing a diminishing range of views. Stories are picked up and replayed. Master narratives determine, with the rigidity of a machine for extruding plastic, the basic way of presenting those ideas.
No, the media is the real echo chamber. The fact that it explicitly presents itself as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes it far more pernicious than some site designed to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on Buffy than he'll ever be on Angel.
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