Abay-lnspired Refractive Amphoras Against Echo Chambers

Öz

The social media environments, where ideas and beliefs aredirected by a single ideology thorough amplified or reinforced information, are commonly defined as echo chambers. Due to its mind-narrowing impact, echo chamber has emerged as a significant problem in communication and knowledge sharing at social media with its nature to censor competitive views. To provide a possible intellectual solution to these relevant problems and issues, the paper aims to reveal what cultural words of wisdom, conceptualization of reflection and refraction, world’s order of nature,and metaphorical interlink among these could do to help us. The initial inspiration of this work is Abay Kunanbayev as a prominent historical figure, philosopher, and the author of The Book of Words. The resulting work mainly benefits from Irtysh and UlbaRivers, as they do not mix, when they meet with each other as a metaphor. Then it links this metaphor with reflective and refractive interactions, and the conceptualization of inter-cultural knowledge amphora in contrast to intra-cultural echo chambers. Following this link, Abay’s Words on knowing and importance of heart in doing so are presented to identify possible solutions to the challenges emerge with echo chambers. In conclusion, a proposition is made for the use of refractive knowledge amphora to address the problems that echo chambers cause, benefiting from the arbitration of heart, suggested by Abay. Through refractive amphoras that facilitates arbitration of heart, cross-cultural interactions can be achieved, resulting in an open mind and new knowledge generation.