Before near real-time national news media coverage and the ubiquity of portable recording devices and online media to distribute the recordings, that was normally the case, but the segmentation was geographic and by addressing selected audiences in closed events. Many political gaffes and scandals of the last couple of decades have been candidates getting caught with unexpected exposure of addresses to either specific geographical markets or closed-group events that were less palatable to general audiences. It won't be too long before political groups maintain social media personas with a variety of constructed backgrounds to capture and expose to wider audiences to which the message would be repugnant those ads that the other side targets narrowly.

Echo chambers always did, but I think the bubble-forming dynamic we have now is a bit different. It's not that I have my own views echoed back to me by the communities I'm in all the time, it's that so much of my exposure to opposing views is often coming from some of the dumbest and most unhinged people on Earth. It's the filtering for nutcases more than echoing back confirming views that seems to be the issue.

It's really easy to believe that certain perspectives are only held by insane people if the only people you see speaking for them happen to be insane. And even if they're not crazy, normal people aren't really going to be interested in communicating nuance or understanding if they're hastily firing off a missive during a toilet break.

There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the big ones is that our intellectual institutions have given themselves over to internet troll logic, including many prestigious Op-Ed pages. In the past you might have encountered plenty of nuts, but you could also see similar enough versions of their ideas being advanced by people who could construct an argument that didn't rest entirely on motivated reasoning, and include enough nuance so as to not be monstrous. But at this point, many professional opinion havers aren't any better or more cogent than a regular Twitter troll. It's mostly just Frankfurtian bullshit all the way down.

Drezner actually has some really good ideas about the replacement of "public intellectuals" with "thought leaders" that touches on this dynamic. https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-h...

>The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”

Yes, absolutely. The prevalence of stupid "both sides" reasoning calls into being the contrarians and gives them a platform - in order to have someone say the world is round, you have to find a flat earth pundit as well and put them opposite each other so the public can enjoy the fight.

The kind of people who find themselves cited in mass shooter manifestoes. At least the Unabomber wrote his own deranged manifesto; these days people assemble them piecemeal from everyday racism and conspiracism.

To be fair he was given an elite education and was, by many accounts, an actual genius and math prodigy. Most people don't clear that bar.

Climate change denial correspondent for Times, Telegraph, Spectator: James Delingpole

Wrong about everything on purpose: Brendan O'Neill (and the rest of the ex-Living Marxism gang who pivoted from Marxism to Libertarianism without ever passing through sanity)

All over television until he had served his purpose and then invisible: Nigel Farage

And of course, reprimanded as a journo for lying about Europe too often; paid more for a weekly column than as a Minister: Boris Johnson

The echo chambers haven't gotten worse at all. They've become easier to observe in action and quantify, because social media is leaving a giant digital trail that everyone can observe (whereas previously the average person didn't leave much of a partisan trail/record for observation or study or reporting). The perception that the echo chambers have gotten worse is merely the horror of seeing the already existing echo chambers in action so vividly now that everything is recorded and everyone has a bullhorn.

With social media you can pick and choose who you interact with, and what content you consume. To make things worse, companies use algorithms that are more likely to show you things you like and already agree with to increase engagement in their platform.

Additionally from my perspective, it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism, where people identify with a specific group and are more and more unwilling to find common ground with one another or to even have respect for differing viewpoints. Things are only seen as black and white, and anyone that doesn't agree is wrong, and must be silenced.

People still have neighbors and coworkers.

> Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same viewpoints and only interact with them, getting the false opinion that an extreme viewpoint is normal and socially acceptable.

The choice to isolate yourself in a like-minded bubble was always available.

On the right: most church communities in small midwestern/southern towns will make social media bubbles look like veritable cornucopias of diversity. Or if you have to live in a larger metro, you can very easily find pockets of people who all attend the same church, work for the same few employers, live in the same zip-code, etc. At my first employer (small finance company in the rural midwest) I joined a church because it was the only way to fit in. I think it's fair to say that the majority of the private K12 schools in the USA and the majority of the home-schooling community are explicitly about isolating your family from the out-group.

On the left: same thing. Live in the city, in particular neighborhoods within the city, send your kids to the right montessori, attend a liberal mainline church (or no church), etc.

I don't think there are more people isolating themselves in bubbles. It's just way easier and far less painful to moan about social media than to point out that a huge fraction of our built world and social infrastructure has the effect of forming various types of bubbles.

Social bubbles make it hard to maintain a huge coalition, because disagreeing with any one part of the hive mind can make life in the bubble unbearable even if you are happy with 90% of the other stuff (e.g., if you're socially and fiscally conservative except that you're openly gay, then the rural midwest church is probably a bubble you'll leave). Precise targeted and personalized advertising doesn't have that attribute.

"Reverting" implies it ever left. Is it not possible that our media system, in the past, just enforced uniformity to effectively create one tribe of people who consumed it and excluded everyone else? As the environment gets more diverse, then the existing tribalism, and the conflicts it engenders, just become more evident.