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0 pointscoldtea7y ago0 comments

Not really. You probably have in mind a "community of interest". But the analog world forces you into many communities of proximity without shared interests as well.

There are communities where you pick the people who are associated with, and communities where you don't get to do that (or do it as much).

The internet gives you huge control over picking communities that think/have interests exactly like yours (and that's exactly what the parent was mentioning to like about the internet communities).

In real life communities that are not e.g. a chess club, but more like neighborhood, school, etc, you are forced to live with, and deal with, all kinds of people, not just the one you chose to. At best, you can move to a different location, but you still don't have the control to pinpoint and seggregate interests the internet gives you.

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Kalium7y ago

You're completely correct! Real life analog communities, light neighborhoods and schools, can force a person to live alongside and deal with a wonderful diversity of people.

However, is it perhaps possible that I may have explicitly considered this kind of purely physical analog community? Maybe that I could have even been thinking explicitly about such examples when commenting that all kinds of communities are echo chambers?

One of the common characteristics of communities is that they enforce norms on the people who are their members. Physical neighborhoods and cities and schools are not different in this way. They are echo chambers too, generally reinforcing a distilled version of regional thinking, and the main lesson they teach tends to be how to bite your tongue.

The big difference between these analog communities and most digital ones is that in the case of the latter, a person can generally search for communities with amenable norms.

You're completely right! Communities of interest are very different from non-optional analog communities. It's just worth considering that despite this major difference, it may not significantly affect their echo chamber nature.

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