Did somebody say this already?

I started this scavenger hunt in response to a seeming consensus at our BloggerCon-by-the-bar: that "linking makes it so," that if there are enough links, there is reality and credibility. I'm working my way towards the difference between secondary (and tertiary and game of telephone xeroxes-of-xeroxes) sources and primary sources.

From Scripting.com, February 2004, an early sighting of the "echo chamber" meme:

... one of the [second BloggerCon] themes is going to be Nuking The Echo Chamber. ... How do we methodically and systematically overcome the tendency for echo chambers to form and self-perpetuate.

From Wikipedia:

... observers of journalism in the mass media describe an echo chamber effect in media discourse. One purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true.

From Onno:

Blogs are recursive ... In his book "The name of the rose", Umberto Eco has one of the monks saying that each book is about other books. It's much the same with blogs.

After a newbie outing I reminisced, recursively, on the recursive nature of our BloggerCon.

From peterme.com's In a Quaker State of Mind, or Why I Had Stopped Blogging:

I was also growing increasingly frustrated with the echo chamber effect of weblogs. A meme drifts out there, and then 38 different people post their take on that meme, and they all link to each other, and, as a reader, you bounce from post to post, the semantic feedback growing until it's deafening. I needed to remove myself from that for a while.

From Wetware, June 20, 2004: The Origins of Our Ideas

More of this: Part A Part B Part D Part E Part F

Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. This information shapes our ideas, opinions and to some extent our personality. But where is it coming from?

Most of us don't pay a lot of attention to this. We believe we make up our own opinions about the things that matter to us and leave the rest to professional and / or self proclaimed pundits.

... Who it is that really shapes our opinions and views on the world? ... [I'd like to] find out where the news and other information I'm consuming is really originated. That way I can see if my sources are colored by the influence of a single media company, religious group or government; the Bush administration or Michael Moore; the WWF for Nature or Texaco; the fans of the Pistons or the Lakers.

Technorati Tags: Meme, Blog, Credibility, Linking