Information Silos Quotes

Increasingly, “left” and “right” don’t just describe divergent political judgments but also sealed-off understandings of what is true and how we know it.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

Having stovepipes—not sharing information—that was the main failure of FEMA in Hurricane Katrina.

For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

If a major source of the nation's news is personalizing user experiences, people with different points of view will end up in echo chambers of their own design. Facebook didn't create that problem, but it shouldn't aggravate it.

Technology has allowed the creation of media echo chambers, so that a person can reinforce, rather than debate, viewpoints.

I wish we had a more open discourse. It's just a shame that with our 24-hour news media and the Internet, people have become so fragmented. They only want to support their own worldview.

When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.

The root cause of all the problems we have in the world today is ignorance of course. But most, polarization.

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.

What Americans seem to prefer — or at least the subset of them who live on social media — is a private square of people who already agree with them. The most successful of these preachers we call “influencers,” which basically means they get paid to manipulate you, and somehow you listen to them anyway.

There are fields of scientific work...which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology...in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

With the Internet there is even more fractioning since we are in echo chambers. With so much propaganda it is hard to calm down enough to listen.

Covid has been a painful lesson in the costs of media and elite conformity, though we wish we could say the conformists have learned much from it.

People have now been absorbing only that they agree with. You know, part of it is if you're liberal, you consume liberal information. If you're a conservative, you consume conservative information. And there's a certain stridency in both that you know everything, and if somebody doesn't agree with you, you think they don't know what they're talking about, and you become intolerant.

Personalization is everywhere. We are constantly asked, directly or indirectly, to create Our Own Whatever - containing and limited to our 'favorite sources of information.' Republicans do that; Democrats do it; environmentalists do it; terrorists do it; science fiction enthusiasts do it. That's a real problem, I think.

The Balkanization of the media means that nobody is having a single conversation with a single set of agreed-upon facts and assumptions the way you had as recently as the 90s.

We begin to inhabit oppositional and rarely intersecting mental universes having to do with ideology and fact and non-fact and news and non-news.

One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't.

All Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas or even adjusting them—the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.