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

A literal echo chamber is a structure designed to maximise acoustic reverberation, and therefore echoes. In cultural terms, and particularly with social media, a metaphorical 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 political polarisation and to conspiracy theories such as 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 committed members of one political party, members of domestic irregular military forces, or possibly one where such people were the intended catch. Alternatively, it could be a spearfishing expedition, as a 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 in front of him. 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 third 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".

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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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