3116: Echo Chamber

Echo Chamber

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Title text: This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created by NARCISSUS IN AN ECHO CHAMBER. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

An Template:W:echo chamber is a structure designed to maximise acoustic reverberation, thus sounds echo excessively well.

However, in social media, a metaphorical Template:W:Echo chamber (media) reverberates the opinions of a group of individuals so that those individuals perceive those opinions as being the social norm. This has resulted in disastrous situations such as Pizzagate, the war over the gold dress and the election of the 44th US President.

Transcript

This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[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]

Here's Mittens falling into the laundry hamper for the THIRD time today!

Now that I've built one, I finally get why people complain about social media echo chambers.

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Discussion

Sorry no " somehow also causing the events themselves to happen repeatedly" is wrong; the point is that people post videos of their cats doing "things" repeatedly; that's just what happens, not an implied effect of the echo chamber itself. 31.54.45.20 08:39, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Weird things happen in xkcd-land. 82.13.184.33 09:14, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I removed that text. Makes no sense. --181.234.89.171 23:06, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Makes more sense than the reference to the dress. 82.13.184.33 08:08, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

What has The dress got to do with an eco chamber? Seems like a poor example. 192.101.166.237 09:51, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Agree. It was an optical illusion that people even very close together, perceived differently, nothing to do with echoing each other's arguments. --Jarfil (talk) 13:40, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Ahh, the good old days. When the color of a dress was the internets biggest controversy. 130.76.187.35 15:28, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I think the "purely partisan fishing expedition" might be the other way around: Cueball expected an expedition where actual fishing would happen, but got into a "purely partisan" or metaphorical "fishing expedition". --Jarfil (talk) 13:40, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I agree on that front. Additionally, I'm not sure where the "fishing poles made from polearms" thing is coming from, since the actual joke here is almost certainly a reference to the practice of Spearfishing, with "purely partisan" implying that it's spearfishing done strictly with partisans. Wote (talk) 15:05, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Based on the echo chamber example, it would be some weird combination of the two - like he went on an actual fishing trip, but all they caught was caches of documents exposing someone's smalltime transgressions. 82.13.184.33 16:34, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I've been near the center of a very echo-y solid walled spherical dome. Basically the real version of this cartoon but more like 5-7 persons tall. This one was used for the projection surface of a flight training device. The acoustics near the center are just WEIRD. Your voice comes back to you as if you were speaking directly into your own ear but somebody just a few feet away sound as if they're halfway across the room. It's ... unsettling but a neat experience. 130.76.187.35 15:02, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Am I the only one who read "partisan fishing expedition" and thought the joke was that it meant everyone was crowded over to either the "left" or the "right" side of the boat, causing it to capsize? Yes? Okay then. MeZimm (talk) 21:11, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I think important for the interpretation of the title text is to understand the usage of the word "purely", if interpreted in the literal sense. As Wote said, it could refer to the partisan as a weapon. Then it would not be allowed to use other weapons or means for catching the fishes. The members being partisans would make the joke much less funny, as both meanings (literal and metaphorical) would be the same or close. Sebastian --88.217.185.170 11:42, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

My interpretation of "purely partisan fishing expedition" is that it is meant to be an extreme example of an "echo chamber" where all of the members are like-minded and of the same political party so there are no contrary opinions to there zeal to uncover dirt about someone in the "other party". Because of the zeal of their partisan opinions the result would be the most severely intense experience of an echo chamber. Rtanenbaum (talk) 16:13, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

This is part 2 in an alleged "I built ..." series, after 2988 (or have I overlooked more?). Worth a category? --2001:A62:587:B01:9769:D180:4D41:151B 19:32, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

As possibly outliers to the "I built..." class might be 2429 and 2460, perhaps. Although think that those aren't quite so similar to your two as your two are to each other. Maybe a proto-sequence/pairing, at least until another example arises that aligns well against both of them and makes it a more obvious set. 92.23.2.228 20:55, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

For a broader “Taking metaphors literally” category (explicit and meta), among others also 1120 and 2674 qualify, maybe also 1639. --2001:A62:587:B01:4B9A:861E:76A8:C159 07:55, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
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