When you first start learning how to drive any decent instructor would have explained how to set your rear-view mirrors and explained the concept of the blind spot. The area that is invisible to you if you just look at your mirrors. The instructor I had was a little over the top in his ways, so when ever I changed lanes without checking the blind spots, he used to yell you just killed a kid driving a bicycle or you just killed a person on a bike. In a way, it did help to hammer home the point he was trying to make. Though hypothetical, he was just explaining the consequences of my actions in the real world. Just like in a car, the driving seat of the journey called life also has blind spots. How often do you check for them?

In your opinion, what’s wrong with the world? I’m not concerned about everything that is wrong in this world. What is one thing that in your opinion, the biggest problem in the world? Well! The answers would differ. Based on your nationality, financial status, Age, gender etc, the answers might vary. What if I told you there is a more prominent thing that influenced your answer?

As the old English saying (correctly) goes, Birds of a feather flock together. That’s the way of the nature. But in the era of globalization, different birds are having to flock together. The street you live in, the bus you take, the super market you use, the place your work… all of them have people from various cultures, races and backgrounds. I am not going to be a saint an say everyone is same. We are different… well that sounds a little negative.. let me try it this way. We are all unique in our own ways. Even the twins may only look same. In terms of ideas and ideologies they can be polar opposites.

When it comes to inconsequential things like favorite color/food/actor, there is never any harm. They may argue a little and may have trouble ordering food as a group in a restaurant. But when it comes to matters that are more serious and uncompromising in our petty minds, we tend to seek birds of same feather. This is because these so called uncompromising things are mostly beliefs and its never fun to be challenged to defend something that cannot be logically defended. Things such as political or religious affiliation, where there is no flawless/perfect choice, people get offended easily because they will not be able to make a clear logical argument for their choice.

So, naturally we tend to interact with people with similar political/religious affiliations be it physical or as it is becoming more and more common – virtual. Those Twitter/Facebook/Instagram feeds filled with memes, jokes and news that consciously and sub-consciously create echo chambers where you keep hearing the same thing again and again. You know what… if you hear something long enough, even if it is horrible you will start to find it tolerating. I owned a house near a highway for 4 years. All the long distance buses used to queue there and from 8 pm to 11 pm and the drivers used to honk like hell. First week was horrible, but after a couple of months, they did not bother me. I got used to it. Okay… you may say that I started ignoring those sounds. But another case in point, again me. I spent about an year driving 260 kms for work every day. That meant I spent 4 hours on road. For the fear of dozing off, I used to play music at full volume. Some of that music was horrible, the only criteria for the songs that I used was good bass and a fast beat. After an year of hearing to them, these horrible songs with stupid lyrics became some of my favorites. They still are my guilty pleasures of music.

This is what happens over time, you tend to develop selective blindness and selective deafness to things that normal people would cringe at. This is exactly what has happened since 2017 when an anonymous used started a theory and that ended up in the attack on the US capitol building 3 years layer. The Q Anon movement is a big thing in America. In reality, it might be a playful guy putting a wild theory on a message board and that in-turn being used by some politically motivated groups to further their self interests. Last week I was going through some applications of machine learning in word processing and I came across someone who actually did an analysis of the posts from this so called Q and came to a conclusion that they were 2 different people. A lot of people who had were aligned with the ideas or just wished the things said by Q were true. So they took a cue from what every he said and converted a small dumpster fire into a wild fire that has started to engulf an entire nation.

So, it is very important to discover if you are living in an echo chamber. Technology provides some options such as Ground news. But it is ultimately up-to you. How diverse is your network? How many people do you know are different from you? Try to be more open in your choice of people you hang out with, you have a better chance of not being sucked into an echo chamber.