Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)
In the book, “The Big Change” (1952), Frederick Allen talks about the year 1900, and (among many differences) he notes that for nearly everyone in the year 1900, the limits of their world rarely extended beyond their own town.
We have this idea today that everyone online is getting trapped in echo chambers, but that’s been the case for most of human history.
This might be a popular contrarian view at the moment, but I'm not sure everyone is trapped in a bubble by social media.
When people mostly communicated with those in their own town that is a bubble. Radio and TV is more of a bubble because there is limited "bandwith" in the scheduling so it has to be editorialised (not necessarily a bad thing).
Social media companies do choose what you see via algorithms, but I'm not convinced they benefit from only showing you content you "agree" with, it feels like being shown a certain amount of content outside your "bubble" would increase screen time. There are also the comment sections that often have contradictory views.
Even social media (setting aside the rest of the internet for the moment) will expose you to more viewpoints than the the social circle in your home town, or a TV/Radio schedule. I'm not saying it is a healthy way to be exposed to other viewpoints, but I don't think the problem with social media is that is creates a bubble.
Increasing engagement doesn't have to just be through agreeable content; consider Twitter ragebait or Instagram [body dysmorphia bait?]. In general, it means your attention is hooked. If people only get content they are likely to be highly engaged with, the range of content will be relatively narrow, and that is a bubble. Perhaps more or larger bubbles, but still noticeably limited perspectives.
If anything considering how vastly more complex things are nowadays (behind superficial appearances), the median adult is likely even more ignorant, in relative terms, than say the median peasant in rural 1700s France, or even in 1900s France.
Hah, I'm not the only one that brings up this book in this context.
The way this is wrought, in the novel, is a savant engineer writes a bot framework that can cheaply and quickly disseminate torrents of misinformation about a provided subject, and then open sources this framework. He basically broke the internet on purpose as a sort of accelerationist move I suppose.
