This was also a really hard assignment
I had a pretty difficult time figuring out what I wanted to say to my elephant and it was even harder to decide what I wanted to say to other peoples elephants.
I did a lot of reading this week on a bunch of a few different topics but ended up doing a deep dive into the world of echo chambers and idea labs which then lead into a whole other world of dealing with political factions and the notion of high and low rung thinkers.
Very quickly, I wanted to define what the 2 types of groups are. An idea lab is an intellectual culture where high-rung thinking thrives and where it can be done communally. Idea labs bolster independent thinking and allow for the freedom of discourse without repercussions. The culture allows for many free-minded thinkers that align on common scientific goals.
The opposite of an idea lab is an echo chamber.
An echo chamber is when a culture holds an object or idea to be sacred, and then the culture becomes embedded with an implicit set of iron-clad social rules about how that object must be treated.
Praising the said object becomes the cool thing to do, while saying anything bad about the object is considered an act of unredeemable blasphemy. How dare you say anything bad about our sacred object (even if it’s a valid criticism) When something becomes uncriticizable to a culture, it becomes an Echo Chamber
I found a great diagram that displays how the different cultures treat ideas
It got me thinking about my own echo chambers, what are the sacred objects that even I won’t criticize. I think earlier on in my career I fell victim to this about my work. Understanding that people could give me valid criticism about my work without it being taken personally was something I wasn’t able to do. It put me on the echo chamber side of the graph above. After being thrown into the workforce it was something I had to quickly get used to.
The largest echo chamber I think in recent years has been Facebook. It’s kinda great that a lot of people I interact with daily tend to not use it, but there are numerous family members that post and use it daily. The echo chamber that Facebook provides allows for misinformation and political extremism to thrive within its network.
Then I got to thinking about how I could persuade people to leave those platforms. Is there another incentive that can speak to peoples elephants to get off this addictive shitty website. One thing that I think could work is the idea of a payout. Would people be Money seemed like the easiest option to do at the moment but I also decided to buy a domain to try and kick-start me to make this project. I bought deleteyourdata.org and created the email [email protected] for people to email me proof that they had deleted their accounts it.
The plan is to hopefully clean up this design and then launch the site with payouts (at this point maybe $1.00 per account deleted but I think that I would want to discuss with more people to see what incentives might make them want to do it.
I think I might revisit this idea and see if there’s something compelling that I could make happen, maybe it’s something like meeting a celebrity, entering a raffle, a free whopper.
