Bubblehead

I used to work as a server at the Drake Diner in Des Moines, IA. It started as a part time job while I was a student, and morphed into a second job after I graduated. Being an easygoing and generally friendly person, I rarely had any trouble dealing with customers; but being an absent-minded person meant I was frequently making extra trips to tables, forgetting one thing or another. After I'd been there a long while and had built up a good working rapport with my manager, she nicknamed me bubblehead. I mentioned it to my roommate, and he laughed a little more than strictly necessary ...

Not so long ago, I wrote about my dislike of 'bubble theology'. I wrote it mere days ahead of the election, and utterly failed to see the now-obvious connection to current events. Bubblehead strikes again.

It seems I am not alone as a liberal/progressive, realizing too late the extent to which our national political discourse has come to exist in bubbles, although I think the term echo chamber is actually better. My twitter feed is populated almost entirely by people who share a lot of my political opinions. My facebook presence is more ideologically diverse, but I clearly focus on what I can connect with, things that align with my own headspace and opinions. I did not unfriend anyone over the course of the election cycle, but I unfollowed at least one person whose comments I saw as offensive. I'm sure the facebook algorithms helped me create my echo chamber, but only because I went down the path on my own. I clicked and read articles with titles that sounded interesting to me. Maybe more importantly, I ignored articles from alt-right news sources, or articles that seemed to contain more bias than information, whatever side they were from.

I'm rambling. The point is that with no intent to do so, I slipped into an echo chamber, where I basically saw a world that reflected my ideology, rather than an accurate picture of our nation. Trump was obviously a horrible excuse for a human being, clearly had disqualified himself a hundred times over from the presidency, and Hillary was eminently qualified, even if she had the frustrating odor of washington politics clinging to her. There was no way the country could make the wrong decision, here - the polls even seemed to show the same picture.

When the FBI director mentioned more e-mails, but within a day it turned out they were from Wiener's device and later they were nothing, I watched the polls tighten in what seemed a totally overblown way. This should have been a smoking gun - obviously a huge portion of the country was seeing this as very important, as important as the debate performances had been. It makes all the sense, in hindsight, because people were in different echo chambers, where different narratives were dominant than the ones I saw.

So. I was complaining about a Christian bubble, while my head was buried in my own echo chamber. The combination of political divisiveness and the internet has made these echo chambers pervasive and dangerous. What is the solution? What do I do differently? I have the feeling it involves a lot of going outside the comforting confines of my echo chamber. Challenging other narratives, without being inflammatory to the people who see that narrative as true. And being open to the idea that maybe the narrative I am following is also wrong, or incomplete, or falls apart outside my echo chamber.

Y'know, just stop being a bubblehead.