Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment - Tablet Magazine ...When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term
“echo chambers” to
describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs
generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on
social media in order to advance assertions that would
formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby
overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters
to keep government spokespeople honest. - In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow.
- If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves...
