Editing 3116: Echo Chamber

{{comic
| number    = 3116
| date      = July 16, 2025
| title     = Echo Chamber
| image     = echo_chamber_2x.png
| imagesize = 383x296px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|This page was created by an echoing cat video. Don't remove this notice too soon.}}

In this comic, Cueball builds an actual echo chamber (the acoustic structure), and discovers that it's very annoying when amplifying the noise of social media (as played on his phone). Of course, this is not the echo chamber complained about in the media, which often reports on the dangers of figurative echo chambers which amplify extreme views.

An {{w|echo chamber}} is a structure designed to maximise acoustic reverberation, in which echoes occur excessively well. However, in social media, a ''metaphorical'' {{w|Echo chamber (media)|echo chamber}} reverberates the opinions of a group of individuals so that those individuals perceive those opinions as being the social norm.  This has resulted in disastrous situations such as {{w|Pizzagate conspiracy theory|Pizzagate}}, the {{w|The dress|war over the gold dress}}, and the election of possibly at least one US President.

[[Cueball]] appears to have confused the two and built a physical chamber designed to echo back the sound of videos he is watching on social media. Specifically, he appears to be watching cat videos, which are stereotypical social media content, but not usually the kind that produces accusations of 'echo chambers. The "Mittens" mentioned in the audio is often associated with a cat name. The reference to it happening "for the third time today" may suggest that the chamber is not just echoing the sound, but is somehow also causing the events themselves to happen repeatedly.

The title text references a "partisan fishing expedition". In general, a "fishing expedition" is an investigation begun on flimsy or no evidence to try to find unsavory or incriminating behavior. When such an investigation is motivated by political considerations in favor of one particular political party, it may be referred to as a "partisan fishing expedition". The joke here is similar to the joke about the "echo chamber": he ended up on an actual "purely partisan fishing expedition" - a trip to catch actual fish where all the people on the fishing trip were either {{w|partisan (politics)|committed members of just one political party}}, or {{w|partisan (military)|members of domestic irregular military forces}}. Quite possibly, it could also refer to fishing poles fashioned out of {{w|partisan (weapon)|polearms}}. Like the joke about the echo chamber, this is the literal realization of something that is usually a mere figure of speech.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Don't remove this notice too soon.}}
[Cueball is sitting on a chair with his hands covering his ears. He is in a circular room with a phone on a stand. All words coming out of the phone are repeated everywhere, getting larger and less opaque]

Cueball: Here's Mittens falling into the laundry hamper for the <u>third</u> time today!

[Caption below panel:] Now that I've built one, I finally get why people complain about social media echo chambers.

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]