Is there an echo in here?

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 00:27:00 +0000

I'm a little confused about the meme du jour, "echo chambers" -- those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them. Here are three places I frequent that seem to fit the bill:

First, I'm on an invitation-only mailing list for moderate lefty Democrats interested in the intersection of ideology and technology. We are all committed to dumping Bush and there's no real possibility we're going to change our minds. Want to argue about it? Not here. We have other things to talk about.

Second, I used to participate occasionally in the Dean weblog comment boards. If you went there to argue that Bush was more deserving of our votes, people would either ignore you or brand you a troll -- and then ignore you.

Third, this fall I went to a baseball game and cheered the Red Sox more loudly than if I had been the only one yelling. My bleacher mates were surprisingly unwilling to talk with me about whether the Sox were deserving of our collective support.

The myth of interference

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 20:30:00 +0000

There's a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Salon.com > David Weinberger

Is there an echo in here?

The myth of interference