3116: Echo Chamber

2025-09-06T03:02:55Z

2A02:6EA0:E606:2640:0:0:0:11: If the echo chamber is "almost as bad as" the fishing expedition, then the fishing expedition was worse than the echo chamber.

{{comic
| number = 3116
| date = July 16, 2025
| title = Echo Chamber
| image = echo_chamber_2x.png
| imagesize = 383x296px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.
}}

==Explanation==
A literal {{w|echo chamber}} is a structure designed to maximise acoustic reverberation, and therefore echoes. In cultural terms, and particularly with social media, a ''metaphorical'' {{w|Echo chamber (media)|echo chamber}} reverberates the opinions of a group of individuals so that those individuals perceive those opinions as being the social norm, and don't receive opinions from opposing groups. This has resulted in {{w|political polarisation}} and to conspiracy theories such as {{w|Pizzagate conspiracy theory|Pizzagate}}.

[[Cueball]] appears to have confused the two and built a physical chamber designed to echo back the sound of videos he is watching on social media. Unsurprisingly to the reader, but apparently not to Cueball, this turns out to be very annoying. Specifically, he appears to be watching cat videos, which are stereotypical social media content, but not usually the kind that produces accusations of 'echo chambers'. The "Mittens" mentioned in the audio is a stereotypical cat name.

Similarly, the "partisan fishing expedition" referenced in the title text has differing metaphorical and real-life interpretations. A metaphorical "fishing expedition" is an investigation begun on flimsy or no evidence to try to find unsavory or incriminating behavior. When such an investigation is motivated by political considerations in favor of one particular political party, it may be referred to as a "partisan fishing expedition". A "purely partisan fishing expedition" would involve a trip to catch actual fish where all the people on the fishing trip were either {{w|partisan (politics)|committed members of one political party}}, {{w|partisan (military)|members of domestic irregular military forces}}, or possibly one where such people were the intended catch. Alternatively, it could be a {{w|spearfishing}} expedition, as a {{w|partisan (weapon)|partisan}} is a type of polearm. It is unclear what strange mashup of the above Cueball found himself involved in, but at the very least it turned out to be deeply unsatisfying, if not actually dangerous, and a worse experience than the echo chamber.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is sitting on a chair with his hands covering his ears. He is in a circular room with a phone on a stand. All words coming out of the phone are repeated everywhere, getting larger and less opaque]

:Phone: Here's Mittens falling into the laundry hamper for the <u>third</u> time today!
:[Caption below panel:]
:Now that I've built one, I finally get why people complain about social media echo chambers.

==Trivia==
Faint grey letters can be seen behind the letters of the comic caption. This is presumably a remnant of the drafting process Randall commonly uses in his comics left there by mistake, although it could be an intentional artefact, as depicting further subtle "echoes".

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

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3116: Echo Chamber