BlogHer - Stepping Outside Our Echo Chambers: Thoughts on Why and How - Comments

I wrestle with the same questions

Maria Niles — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:42:33 -0500

I've dealt with it by giving in to serendipity. I like building the number of people I'm following on twitter but Kristie is right that once you get past 150 or so it becomes impossible to really follow everyone. So I'm working on dipping in and checking @ replies and letting go of checking every conversation. I'm not sure how I feel about it so I may change my approach up.

With feeds, I've more or less abandoned my feed readers. I cannot keep up with them. I periodically check in on friends and rely on other people pointing me to good stuff. I find lots of new voices this way and catch a lot of familiar favorites. But if I read everything in my feed readers, I would have time to do nothing else.

It's an ever evolving approach and I haven't discovered the perfect answer. If I do, I'll let you know and promise me you'll do the same ;)

Reading and Travel

Maria Niles — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:31:08 -0500

Reading is a strategy I use often but, as you know, I am a bit of a hermit ;)

Travel I think is brilliant. Something I should do more of. I learn so much when I do and am able to learn a bit about the history and culture of a new place. I would imagine Vietnam blew your mind open in all sorts of good ways.

I'm having a twitter problem and a feed reader problem

Denise — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:31:54 -0500

First, twitter. I immediately follow anyone, who is not a spammer, who follows me and now I cannot really follow any discussion properly. It's impossible for me to listen or interact in any significant way. I need to do something - but I don't quite know what to do or how to do it.

Next, my feedreader overfloweth. That's nothing new, it has always held far too many feeds but now - it's worse. I am subscribing to EVERYONE and I'm not deleting feeds. Also, I feel like I'm not paying close enough attention to the new people I've added because it's harder work to get to know someone new than it is to focus on people I already know.

I'm tempted to remove all of the people I have been reading and following "forever" from both twitter and my feedreader and focus on new voices for awhile. But... I'd miss all of you old friends so... what do I do?

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Flamingo House Happenings

I read.

lauriewrites — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:18:08 -0500

I absolutely have to escape the echo chamber. I'm a person who has to get up and move to another room to read something I'm working on critically. I need to go outside. I need a change of scenery to redirect my thoughts and approach things again more productively.

Also I read and read and read. I think that's kept me - in some cases forced me to be - open all my life, and it is the same now. It can get a little overwhelming now that i read a lot online, because 20 links later sometimes I don't feel any smarter. ;) But I do make an effort to open myself to ideas different from my own.

I try to talk to and befriend people who have something to teach me, who come from somewhere else or have a different world view. I ask a lot of questions.

Traveling has also forced me out of my comfort zone in the best of ways. One of the most surreal but important moments I had in Vietnam was when I looked around and realized that I had no idea what any of the signs or people said, and if I were to need something or need to get somewhere, I'd have to do it completely on my own. It was simultaneously the most exhilarating and terrifying feeling I've ever felt.

Laurie

LaurieWrites

Stepping Outside Our Echo Chambers: Thoughts on Why and How

Maria Niles — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:44:09 -0500

Do you ever notice how when you learn about a new idea or thing you start noticing it everywhere? Like when you buy a new car and suddenly everyone around you is driving the same one. Or you learn about a hot up-and-coming singer and you hear their latest hit song at the mall, on hold music, in a TV commercial and so on. Your mind gets tuned into that thing and it begins to leap out at you and infiltrate your consciousness.

Another phenomenon you might be aware of is how people around you start to pick up on and mention the same thing all at the same time. Like today, I stumbled across a new website somebody mentioned on twitter 18 hours before I read his twitter stream. This is someone whom I don't follow but who has about 10,000 people who do follow him. I hadn't heard about this website nor did I see it mentioned before reading about it there, on twitter. I mentioned this website as potentially useful to a friend who then tweeted about it. Within the next hour I watched as almost a dozen people in my timestream mentioned this website. If I hadn't been aware of how it got seeded into my timestream I probably would have been shocked by how many people independently and randomly mentioned the same website. This time, however, I recognized that it's because the people I follow follow the people I follow.

It is an example of an echo chamber where the same few ideas and observations rocket around and around, bouncing off walls and coming back to you over and over again. Only hearing the same small set of ideas repeatedly and listening to the same small set of voices can be affirming but unhealthy. Sometimes it's good to recognize that we have become too isolated and perhaps unchallenged and to set about to shaking things up.

Kristie Wells, a San Francisco based social media maven has decided to do a little spring cleaning to her twitter account by deleting every fourth person she follows and replacing them with someone from her following list. Kristie keeps her follow number relatively small so she can really listen so she is trying this experiment, which she will repeat periodically, rather than follow all of the thousands who follow her.

I have been taking a look at my Twitter ‘network’ as of late, wondering how I can mix up the information that flows through my world without requiring too much more investment of time on my side....

Excited to see/hear new things, meet new people, AND keep in contact with those in my original network (whether directly following you or not).

You can read more about her resoning and methodology at her personal blog, Kiki's Korner.

Isabel Swift, who writes about the romance novel publishing world, interviews Marsha Zinberg, an Executive Editor at Harlequin, who says:

"What I love about the diversity of the programs I manage is the opportunity it affords me to acquaint myself with rising stars and new voices within the company. I'm able to offer them—as well as authors with whom I’m more familiar—projects that are outside the familiar series world. These projects, because they are unusual or sometimes innovative, allow authors to really flex their writing muscles and grow in new and surprising ways!

I like the multiple approaches to exiting her echo chamber at work here; she grows from hearing new voices and familiar voices become new by tackling innovative projects.

While spending time on local blogs, amandaa at Washington, DC Metblogs worries that some voices, in their enthusiasm, might be making it difficult to hear the voices of neighborhood wisdom:

It’s cool that new residents are such boosters for where they live, but it also bums me out to think that they might be (unintentionally) drowning out other voices.

Karen Vanuska writes that it might be healthy if established literary review sections went out of business because it could open the door to new perspectives and a wider range of books being reviewed:

So, while NYT failed to convince me that this book was worth reading, they did further convince me that they are in business of selling books, not critiquing them. How sad for writers and those of us interested in literary criticism. Perhaps it's a good thing if newspapers like the NYT get out of the book reviewing business: why do something if you're not going to do it well. The good news is the field is now wide open for fresh voices eager to create a new paradigm for contemporary literary criticism -- time for shameless plug -- like the voices in the ezine Open Letters.

Lavender Rain writes that thoughts are ageless and there is value to always seeking new ideas:

I am hopeful that I may let the earned wrinkles come, let my hair turn to silver, and allow myself to dress in a simple style of comfort. However I must always be mindful to live in the moment and be open to new thoughts and ideas as we all age, however we become old and bitter when we close our minds and limit ourselves to new creative thought and young fresh ideas…

How do you step outside your own echo chambers and open yourself to new voices and ideas?

BlogHer CE sometimes documents the new things she tries and observes at her blog Beyond Help.