AS SOON AS I write “empathy and technology” it will be outdated. Such is the world of both the new neuroscience of empathy and tracking the evolution of technology. But to not talk about empathy and technology would be to ignore what is a very important relationship. By now, I hope we can agree that empathy is about connections made, or not made, among individuals, groups, and even communities. It is part of how we interpret the behaviors of others and how we act toward them. This interplay among human beings has involved direct face-to-face contact for most of human history. Human beings have been conversant with each other for at least fifty thousand years (of course, records of this are nonexistent, so it is left to biologists, anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, and a host of other scientists to argue this point—some believe humans had language much earlier, while others dispute that idea). For thousands of years before that humans were communicating in ways that were forerunners to developed languages.
Communication is part of the process we go through to understand the behaviors of others, which we also know to be integral to our survival. Thus, we can assume that some of the components or variations of the components of empathy have been shared among people for a very long time. Technological communication, on the other hand, is in its infancy in terms of human history. The first telephone call was placed in 1876 and the first email was sent in 1971. The first website went live twenty years later in 1991. Facebook was launched in 2004. Live distance communication between people is not even 150 years old, and the forms of communication that seem ubiquitous like smartphones and tablets are a mere fifteen to twenty years old. That means that the only generation to have grown up with this technology is today’s young adults. We will not know definitively for years to come what impact, if any, this new way of growing up will have on people. All forms of technology as a part of human relationships is very new in the spectrum of human development. We are only in the very early stages of understanding what the positive and negative consequences may be of all our forms of electronic communication. In this chapter I will do my best to share what we know now and how our understanding of brain science and empathy may give us insight into what technology can offer in terms of building empathy, and how, on the other hand, it might hinder empathy.
Let me start by saying that I think using the technology we have today to communicate is not the same as interacting face to face. “Reading” people’s behaviors and emotions and being able to mirror them is best done live and in person. I say that for one primary reason: you can take in the entire context and use all your senses better than if the person is delivered to you via an electronic medium. However, I am not, I repeat, not against technology. After my mother died, we decided to move my father to live near one of his children. At the time I was living in Arizona, so relocating him to me made a lot of sense, and I was the least likely to move in the coming years. We were right; it was a wise move. It was also the early years of cell phones, and that technology made my life as the primary geographic caretaker inordinately better. I could go out, travel, and still be reachable in an emergency. I left the theater in the middle of a movie to rush to the emergency room on the night my father had a heart attack because the staff with him were able to call me immediately. I was in the emergency room minutes after he arrived, and he was immediately less agitated when he saw me. Modern technology made that possible. I could give you a hundred examples in which my family used cell phones to connect in good ways that were life altering. My experience is shared by others, as research has shown that there are positive communication aspects to the rise in use of mobile phones.1
I was sitting on a plane reading when I realized I needed to address the topic of empathy and technology in this book. I grabbed my bag and frantically looked for paper and a pen so I could jot the idea down so I would not forget it. I had the pen in hand and was trying to think where I might have a spare piece of paper when I laughed at myself. There in my bag was my ultra-lightweight Surface laptop computer that I bought because it had a great keyboard I could attach or detach and that would allow me to write in ways that were almost like writing on my full keyboard at home. I stashed the pen, grabbed my laptop, and started writing this chapter. Technology had triumphed again, although using it was not my first reaction in that immediate moment of need. I know that for anyone years younger than I am, it would not have occurred to them to dig for paper and pencil, but I was raised in a different era, and so learning technology has all been introduced new at various times in my life. I love word processors and did everything I could to afford the first-generation home desktop computers so I could write my papers in the new way that allowed for any number of rewrites and drafts, all without having to take paper from a tree. Today I would be hard pressed to tell you how many different computers and cell phones I have gone through; in fact, I can’t. For me, and I imagine everyone reading this book, technology is a vital part of our lives.
But what about empathy and technology? Is technology helping or hindering empathy? My immediate response to those questions is: we don’t know. Things are emerging and changing so fast that only time will tell. However, we can and should consider the question. I have touched on it in other chapters, for example in the idea of using media to connect people to the stories of other people’s lives across great distances. As I was writing this on the plane, I wondered if there was enough research out there to write an entire chapter to address this question, or if it would be a collection of questions for the future. I discovered that it is both, but there are a lot more questions than there is research.
What We Know About Empathy and Technology Today
Interest in research on technology and empathy has primarily taken two paths, one to assess the positive aspects of communicating and sharing of ourselves with others via technology and one to assess negative influences, that is, how impersonal and negative communication can become via technology. The positive interest focuses on how technology can extend connections and help us to see through virtual reality what other people’s lives are like. The negative concern focuses on the power of disturbing content, such as violent video games, and anonymity as a pathway to less empathy or worse, disregard for others. The overarching question is: Should we be encouraged or concerned about technology and human relations?
Over a thousand people born since 1980 (those considered the internet generation) participated in an online survey that tried to assess whether use of online communication reduces time spent face to face with others and how virtual empathy compares to face-to-face empathy.2 These are two important questions to ask, and thankfully we have some data to look at. The results of the study showed that going online did not reduce people’s face-to-face communication. In fact, communicating online with someone you already know might actually increase the chances that you will connect with that person offline. This suggests that for people with whom we already have a relationship, staying in touch online might actually support and even advance our connections with the person face to face. In terms of the other part of the question, real-world empathy scores were higher than virtual empathy scores, but they were significantly related in a positive direction. That is, the higher the ability for empathy in face-to-face encounters, the higher online as well, but overall, face-to-face empathy is stronger than virtual empathy. This makes sense because of the lack of context and because there are fewer nonverbal cues available through the online medium. The same researchers looked at social support, the feeling of being supported by family, friends, and other significant people in your life, and how that might be conveyed online versus in person. Their analysis revealed that the feeling of being supported was stronger through in-person empathy than through virtual empathy. That is not to say that feeling understood by others through online communication is not helpful, but it is not nearly as strong as getting that empathic understanding in person.
The finding that one’s sense of empathy from others exchanged through face-to-face interactions is stronger than from online interactions, while not surprising, does not mean that we should totally write off support that comes from the world of technology. Development of empathy has been found in the online world, particularly with specialized support groups. In research on people involved in patient online communities (online social networks made up of members who come together to gain information, share experiences, and offer emotional support around a common issue), the member experience of such groups can enhance empathy through building trust and sharing information.3 Furthermore, the higher the levels of empathy built within the online community, the more trusting and supported members feel. These positive feelings are most likely to evolve when members feel a common social identity, the sense that they are part of a community. This online finding reflects what we already know about feeling part of an ingroup or being a member of a tribe. We have stronger empathy with (and from) members of our own group, however that gets defined. Therefore, if we can replicate group cohesiveness online as we do in person, there will be stronger feelings of empathy for those in our groups.
Text messaging is another form of communication that deserves our attention. More and more, the health field is using the text message medium to send updates, reminders, and information to patients about ways to take care of their health. For example, text messages sent to help people with diabetes remember to take their medications4 and information and positive reinforcement sent via text to patients in weight-loss programs5 all seemed to help those involved in the programs. In an effort to use the health promotion models of text messaging, a group of researchers employed similar methods to try and increase people’s empathy and prosocial behaviors.6 The researchers sent one set of participants empathy-building messages such as “Think about your last social interaction. What was important to them in the conversation? Can you try to see the world as they do?” and “Smile at the next person you see, no matter who they are.” The other group members either received general messages or no messages. When the groups were compared over time as to whether they felt more empathic and actually behaved more empathically, those who received the empathy-building messages showed more empathy, prosocial responses, and behaviors. The one difference that seemed to confound the researchers a bit was that even though the outside indicators of empathy and prosocial behaviors increased for the participants, that is, those who received the empathy-inducing texts actually showed more empathy, the participants themselves did not feel they were more empathic.
When I read that I was reminded of a course I taught on social empathy. I wanted to test out my work in the classroom, so several years ago I developed and taught the course. The first thing I did was have each student take the Social Empathy Index, a survey that my research group had developed to measure interpersonal and social empathy. Fifteen weeks later, at the end of the course, I had them take the survey again and compare the results. I confess I was a little nervous. Could I teach about empathy and in the process help people to be more empathic? Overall, all the students had increases in most of the components, but some did go down. We had a lively discussion afterward. The sense of the group was that before the course started they thought they were more empathic than they assessed themselves to be after learning the details and depth of information on empathy. What they expressed was that because they were social work students, they scored themselves high on the items because, well, that is what social workers are good at. But once they delved deeply into all the dimensions of empathy, they were more aware of what skills and abilities they had and were stricter about how they assessed their own empathy. By the end of the course they felt they had a much better understanding of empathy, but now they also had higher expectations of themselves. That was why they were scoring themselves lower in some places. They did not think they were less empathic, they were just more accurate. I think that is what the researchers with the text messaging program may have found as well. When we teach empathy, we raise people’s awareness, and while that can help them to be more empathic, it can also raise their expectations and assessments of where they are in terms of being empathic.
Even I had that experience. Once I learned about all the components of empathy, I realized that I could be much better at taking other people’s perspectives and handling situations with more emotion regulation because I understood the concepts more clearly. It reminded me of when I learned to play soccer years after I had been playing recreationally. I thought I was a good soccer player, but when my coach pointed out things that I could do better, my realization was that the way I originally saw myself play was forever changed and my expectations were higher. Ultimately I think it made me a better soccer player, and I think my research on empathy has made me more empathic as well. But in the process it felt like I regressed before I improved. Although that is how it felt, I don’t think that is how it actually played out. I didn’t get worse, I just raised the bar and expected more of myself.
What About Young People?
Adolescence is a key time for neural development. It has also become recognized as a developmental period with greater use of technology and time spent on computers, smartphones, and video games. Because of the newness of all these forms of technology, it is only people in their twenties and early thirties who have lived their entire lives with such technology surrounding them. This generation will be the first to tell us about the impact of technology and their development. But they will not be the first generation to live through the creation and evolution of a new form of communication.
If we consider the entirety of human development, our species has had to accommodate numerous changes in communication: the introduction and spread of the written word, printing press, telephones, silent and then sound movies, and television. And with each generation, these advances were accommodated and absorbed, although they were often preceded by concern from the previous generations who had not experienced these forms of communication. I had no idea that over two thousand years ago Socrates worried that the invention of the written word would cause people to be forgetful and not use their memories. He considered the characters of letters to be outside people and would lead them away from using their own skills of thinking and using memory.7
Today we cannot imagine a world without the written word. As noted in chapter 2, the creation of the printing press allowed for more and more people to read about other people and develop perspective-taking skills. The written word and the ability of the printing press to make those words accessible to the average person helped build empathy across human civilizations. And that positive contribution may also be the case for technology.
What research we have on brain development during adolescence finds no evidence that the use of the internet has any measurable impact on neural development.8 While there may not be a physiological impact, there may be social impacts. For example, using social networking sites such as Facebook can aid in adolescent development by connecting friends, getting to know people better, and enhancing the quality of relationships. A review of over twenty studies found that adolescents’ use of social networking sites is an extension of their offline relationships and in general benefits their sense of self.9 Groups on the internet can be places for youths to find others who share their interests or their identity. Such connections can aid in adolescent development by providing social support. However, one study that closely tracked the sense of well-being of a group of young adult Facebook users in relation to their use of the site found that Facebook use predicted negative shifts in how they were feeling and how satisfied they were with their lives.10 The researchers did their best to control for other reasons that may have influenced their feelings, such as simply having a bad day. They also compared how the participants felt interacting in person with people at the same time and found that direct contact made them feel better. Thus, it is unlikely that technological communication can replace or greatly improve the relations young people have in their face-to-face world.
The research that is out there shows us that online communication is not wildly different from face-to-face communication. The more we already know someone and the more we are connected as part of an identity group, the more empathy there will be between us. And the empathic process is stronger in person. However, developing relationships online can still be done with empathy. As in the case of support groups and building connections, finding people who share your interests or concerns, while difficult in limited geographic areas, can be greatly enlarged by using the online world.
Is There a Downside to Technology?
Violent video games, cyberbullying, and internet trolls show us that not all that is online and available through today’s technology is a good thing. Indeed there are aspects of new technology that are disturbing and need our attention to assess how people, especially young people, are impacted.
Research has shown that there are changes in brain communication immediately after watching violent media or playing violent video games.11 Some research suggests that exposure to media violence lessens the brain’s activity to regulate emotions, which can lead to impulsive behavior. Other research suggests that there can be positive aspects, such as improved ability to process visual input. But even this positive change comes at a cost, which is that of becoming desensitized to the violence. These studies monitored brain activity in labs while participants used or viewed videos or immediately following. What might be the longer-term impact? Although these neural changes may be problematic, the changes seem to be short term. Recent research has shown that when long-term impact is assessed, there does not seem to be an influence.12 In fact, the researchers suggest that the use of violent video games may be a symptom and not a cause for aggressiveness or low empathy. That is, those who already have lower levels of empathy or higher levels of aggression may be more inclined to play violent video games, thereby reinforcing their personality, while those who do not share those traits are not affected negatively by playing the games.
Although long term there may not be a lasting effect, the power of violent and sexist video games to reinforce existing stereotypes can be significant. For example, among young men, stronger identification with domineering male characters in such videos was connected to less empathy for female victims of violence.13 It may be that violent videos do not cause a lack of empathy, but they may serve as reinforcement for existing beliefs.
I would suggest that based on what we know about the neural processing of empathy, for those who are highly empathic and have strong abilities to mirror and take the perspective of others, the violent imagery of video games that immerse players in virtual reality might be exhausting and overwhelming if played for too long. Think about walking out of a theater after watching an intense movie; everyone is talking about the film and sharing an emotional reaction. This initial experience may very well feel powerful and impact how you are thinking, but the impact dissipates fairly quickly. If it did not, there likely would be fewer people going to watch intense movies. After all, imagine being emotionally impacted for weeks by one movie or video. We would be emotionally overwhelmed and we might stop watching. Thus, there may well be a self-selection of who uses violent media (those who are more desensitized to violence or feeling emotions), and as such it is a marker of predisposed personality traits rather than causing changes in one’s personality.
Overall, the research we have suggests that for those who have empathy or are in the process of developing it, technology may enhance those abilities, particularly with people we already have a relationship with, and may introduce us to new people with whom we can explore developing connections. But for those who are already struggling with connecting to others, technology may reinforce the distance. That seems to be the case with two areas of concern on the internet: cyberbullying and “trolling,” the practice of negating and harassing others online.
Cyberbullying is bullying that occurs online. It is characterized by the same aspects of bullying, which I define as intentional aggressive actions taken against another person who is vulnerable by virtue of characteristics that the bully regards as a weakness. The 24/7 nature of the online world and the option of anonymity make cyberbullying particularly concerning with today’s growing reach of technology. That raises the question of whether cyberbullying is a greater problem than face-to-face bullying and therefore a different problem, or if it is another medium for the overall problem of bullying. Data on thousands of school-aged children show that bullying in person is more common, with about one in four young people reporting in-person bullying compared to about one in fourteen experiencing cyberbullying.14 But there is tremendous overlap, with most youth who are cyberbullied also facing the problem in person. This is another example of the internet serving as an additional outlet for behaviors that occur frequently in person.
In fact, it appears that the characteristics of bullies do carry over to cyberbullies. Low levels of empathy are related to both face-to-face and online bullying.15 It is interesting to delve more deeply into the studies. There is a difference between the ability of bullies to experience the emotions of others compared to understanding the emotions of others.16 For bullies, feeling the emotions of others is low, but understanding their behaviors can still be fine. What this tells us in terms of the components of empathy is that those who bully tend to have low levels of the unconscious affective response part of empathy but higher levels of perspective-taking. They can read other people’s behaviors but not feel them. (You may recall from chapter 6 that this same characteristic was found in people diagnosed with psychopathy. While not all bullies are psychopathic, bullying is a behavior common to those with psychopathy.)
Reading other people without feeling what they feel can lead to taking power over others through manipulation and bullying. There may also be another missing piece of empathy for bullies. High impulsivity is related to all forms of bullying. High impulsivity means acting out without much self-control and without thinking about the consequences of those actions. Having difficulty with self-control suggests that bullying is accompanied by low levels of emotion regulation. Thus, by parsing the components of empathy when analyzing bullying we can better understand what might help to change the behavior of bullies. Focusing on perspective-taking—imagine what the other person is thinking—may not help as much as getting a bully to feel what another person is feeling. It may also be important to help curb impulsive behavior, getting those with bullying tendencies to curb their own emotions and to try to think before acting. Of course, these are skills we try to teach all children, and for good reason. It gets harder if those lessons were not learned young and need to be learned later in life. That is a challenge we will talk about in chapter 8.
What we do know is that, as with other behaviors, a person who is not a bully in person will probably not find cyberbullying attractive, while the person who is known to bully others face to face will find online bullying to be another forum for that behavior. If those who bully are reported to have lower levels of empathy, raising the levels of empathy among those who are bullies may help to move them away from such behaviors. Empathy may be a tool to counteract bullying, but only if we can target the underlying missing parts. I would suggest that emotion regulation is key, as well as testing to see if affective response is missing so that we can teach people who lack the ability to feel other people’s emotions to either tap into their own emotions or work around that deficit.
In her book Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, Emily Bazelon looks closely at several cases of cyberbullying, giving us insight into the victims and the bullies themselves.17 We know bullying is not new, but because technology makes it possible to enter into a person’s world 24/7, even while they are in the safety of their own home, cyberbullying is that much more critical to address. After delving deeply into the young people’s lives, she also suggests that one approach to decrease bullying is to build empathy. She not only advocates for teaching empathy to keep kids from becoming bullies but also suggests that increasing the empathy of the bystanders, those who either pass along the bully’s messages or can choose not to and stop the amplification of the bully’s messages, may be more important. When it comes to young people, the support of peers is incredibly important, and to have a peer’s support to stop a bully from harassment can be life-saving. Empathy for a victim can be key to becoming a bystander who takes an active stand against bullying. This is especially important because bullies often use othering as a way to cut victims off from any outside support. How many of us can remember what it felt like to be made fun of, and what relief there was when the target of the joke was someone else? That made us feel part of the ingroup, although at the expense of someone who was identified as being an outsider. Empathy can motivate those who are not the targets of bullying to speak up and disrupt the victimization of the bully’s target.
Trolling
I would argue that trolling is a specialized form of cyberbullying. While doing research for this chapter I came across an entire book that looked at internet trolling from a scholarly perspective. The book, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips, is based on her doctoral dissertation that documented years of research on internet trolling.18 Kudos to Dr. Phillips for tackling this topic and to her committee members for approving it and granting her a degree. While this may be new territory for research, it likely marks the beginning of what will be a cascade of dissertations and scholarly articles on human behavior and the World Wide Web. I had a lot of ideas about the dark side of the web gleaned from media coverage and my limited personal experiences. I was pleased to find a source that actually used rigorous social science research methods to look at the practice of trolling. Trolling is still evolving, but generally it is defined as the online practice of posting or engaging in discussions in order to disrupt and upset as many people as possible. Phillips argues that trolling is an amplification of cultural problems and that it is a symptom and not a cause. It reflects mainstream practices that trolls take to extremes. We have normalized news reports that are sensationalized through attention-grabbing headlines and talk shows that trash people who believe differently. The political mudslinging of election campaigns and the way elected officials are sometimes discussed (for example, as aliens not born here or relatives to accomplices of assassins, all myths but sensationalized in the media nonetheless) are examples of mainstream culture’s desensitizing us to issues and depersonalizing those with whom we do not agree. Using anonymity, trolling opens the world of criticism and depersonalization to anyone. Posting anonymously lifts social prohibitions, permitting one to say things that would not be said in person. However, while the troll is typically anonymous, trolling is done to known targets, setting up an imbalance of power. (When I read this, I thought of the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing and lynching and how they hid their identities under hoods while their victims were not masked. They used their anonymity to inflate their power). This is a strong critique of our culture; trolling is a reflection of what we tolerate, and even encourage, in our modern society.
Phillips makes several important points that suggest trolling lacks empathy. Although trolling can be directed at anyone, it is disproportionately directed at people of color, women, and LGBTQ folks; it disparages human attachments by mocking connections, ideology, and sentimentality; and it celebrates anonymity, making personal responsibility nonexistent. Taken together, trolls operate from positions of power and privilege, trampling on ethics of civic and social behavior. “Trolls exercise what can only be described as pure privilege—they refuse to treat others as they insist on being treated. Instead, they do what they want, when they want, to whomever they want, with almost perfect impunity.”19 What is sorely missing is feeling what others are feeling, understanding those feelings by walking in another’s shoes, and thinking about context and the historical events that have shaped our world. What is missing is empathy.
This lack of empathy in internet trolling is supported by a recent study that sampled over four hundred people online and compared their levels of psychopathy, sadism, and empathy with their engagement in online trolling.20 They found that men were more likely to participate in online trolling and that higher levels of psychopathy and sadism predicted this behavior. The researchers also found that the online trolls reflected the same characteristics of in-person psychopathy in relation to empathy—they could recognize the emotional pain of their cyber victims, which helped them to manipulate and play on that pain, but could not feel their victims’ emotions.
There are so many examples of trolling and all are disturbing by definition. I debated even citing any examples, as I do not want to be a contributing bystander. But a couple of examples really disturbed me, not so much for the content but for the intrusion into civil and personal life. The first example happened in the summer of 2017 as the political primary period began leading up to the 2018 election.21 One of the declared challengers, a Democrat for the U.S. Senate, launched her campaign through her Facebook account. Deedra Abboud is an attorney who happens to be Muslim and wears a headscarf. Anyone can see that on her Facebook page. She wrote a post about religious freedom that caught the attention of many critics (which is a kind word for internet trolls—I cannot say for sure whether these were people who identify as such, but their responses fit the definition). People freely posted comments about sending her back (she was born in the United States), used profanities, called her names like “towel-head” and member of a “filthy death cult,” and used male-dominated sexual threats. All of these comments are reflective of trolling. She received hate mail, threats, and counter-protests from white supremacist groups. All for declaring her intention to run for political office, a democratic right that we all have. So what bothers the trolls? That she is doing so as a member of a nondominant religion, Islam, with an ideological commitment to religious freedom, and as a woman. I admire Deedra Abboud because she did not stop her campaign, and ironically the haters actually brought national attention to it. But the lack of empathy is unmistakable.
The second example was personal. One of my favorite pastimes is following professional baseball. I have loved the sport since I was a child and enjoy watching and reading about my team. I often go to the team’s web page, read the news articles, and even read the comments section. I had followed the team for years, and one day I decided to join in the online comments. (I confess it was likely motivated by procrastination, keeping me busy on the computer in a much more enjoyable way than work.) My experience entering a chat on a baseball team page was horrible—my first posted opinion got shredded and my intellect was called into question. It took all of two minutes. I never posted again. I love baseball, and that was my favorite team, but the vitriol of fellow fans was just too much for me to accommodate in something that is a hobby and supposed to be fun. I had experienced the trolling goal: they not only disagreed with my comment but also demeaned me personally. It had the powerful effect of shutting me down.
There are countless examples. Just go online and read through the comments posted in response to news articles, editorials, blogs, or even memorials. The vitriol is especially disturbing when the target is a woman. My own experiences helped me to feel how unempathic the world of the internet can be and the power of trolling to shape our technological dialogue.
Twitter
I have no research to report on Twitter and empathy. When I initially researched “Twitter and empathy” on Google Scholar I got six results. I had never seen a Google search result that did not even have a second page. No research, no evidence to support or disclaim a relationship between empathy and Twitter. Although I have no research per se, I do have some thoughts on the medium and how it fits our discussion on empathy and technology. Twitter may be a very popular form of communication, but I would argue it is limited and very narrow, leaving very little room for empathic expression.
One-way announcements of up to 280 characters are not interaction. (And my point is reinforced by the fact that Twitter decided to double the limit from 140 to 280 characters in late 2017.) It provides information that might lead to an empathic thought because it might trigger affective mentalizing, but it involves very little actual personal exchange among people. For example, a person might post a moving comment, and then hundreds of others will retweet it to reinforce the feeling. Some people might post a response, but for the most part there is no dialogue. In fact, one of those six items that came up in my early search for “Twitter and empathy” was a blog written by a young person lamenting the slew of tragic headlines shared on Twitter each morning, having the effect of desensitizing people to human conditions.22 The writer agreed that being informed instantaneously was helpful but that the slew of information had a numbing effect. We know from brain research that is true.23 So for that reason I think Twitter has very little to contribute to developing interpersonal and social empathy among people and groups. I suppose saying that will invite trolling, but then that would then prove my point. It is an excellent forum for information exchange, although the veracity and accuracy of that information is minimally controlled. This means that, like so much of technology, the burden of proof is on the user, not the producer of information. This one-way responsibility is not unique to Twitter, but it is more pronounced.
As I write this in the winter of 2018, it would be negligent of me to not address the use of Twitter by the most powerful person in the United States, the president. Donald Trump is not the first president to use Twitter; Barack Obama had (and still has) an official Twitter account. However, Trump is the first president to use it so personally and so often. It has been described by his staff as his official communication, raising Twitter to the place of national policy.24 Yet the president has mixed in personal comments, put-downs (for example, his comments about the TV news show hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough in his June 29, 2017, tweet: “low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe…she was bleeding badly from a face-lift”), and misinformation (citing voter fraud when research disputes that, inauguration numbers that defy photographs of the event, etc.), all delivered directly to citizens. From the time he declared candidacy through the first year of his term in office, Trump had insulted 425 people, places, and things through his Twitter posts. How do we know this? Because the New York Times keeps a running tally you can view at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html.
His use of Twitter is immediate, without much if any editing or staff advice based on the posting time of many (done in the wee hours of the morning) and the spelling and grammatical errors, as well as the corrections or deletions that follow. During the last month of the presidential campaign, candidate Trump averaged seven tweets a day. During the first one hundred days of his presidency, he averaged four per day.25 In spite of this open and direct form of communication, people may not find it as helpful or as desirable as the president does. After six months of the Trump presidency, polling showed that 68 percent thought his use of Twitter was inappropriate, 65 percent thought it was insulting, 58 percent thought it was not effective, and 73 percent said it was not refreshing.26 This is encouraging for those of us who would like to see more meaningful communication exchanges modeled in the public domain. If the public continues to find presidential use of Twitter to be ineffective, maybe it will be replaced with more positive interactions that reflect more human interaction and possibly more interpersonal and social empathy.
It is too soon to say what the long-term impact of this style of communication, short bursts of information in 280 characters or less, will be, but it does reflect some key missing components of empathy. The speed of posting often shows minimal emotion regulation, the superficial nature of having only space for a few sentences belies deeper analysis of the world through historical and contextual understanding, and the predominate one-way mode of communication reflects announcing to others instead of engaging in discussion, which minimizes perspective-taking and shows poor self-other awareness. That is not to say that Twitter is not useful; rather, we need to be clear on its shortcomings in terms of facilitating deep connections among people and fostering empathy.
So Is Technology Helpful or Harmful in Terms of Empathy?
Twitter, social media, text messages, use of email—these are all tools. Tools are only as helpful or as harmful as the user. The same hammer can be used to build something or destroy something. I can be mean or nice to people in person or online; that is up to me regardless of the technology. It is important to remember that so we don’t argue about whether technology is good or bad without considering the person behind it. Who we are as people influences how we use technology as well as how technology impacts us.
Used well, technology can help us to connect to people far away, share ideas, and tell our stories. It can open the world to people who live in isolation due to physical limitations or geographic distance. Pictures are worth a thousand words, although too many and we may become desensitized. I am a teacher, and through the reach of the internet I have students all over the world. That is an incredible opportunity and responsibility for me and my students. That is what I think sums up technology: it gives us new opportunities to touch the lives of others, but we must remember to do so responsibly and to treat others as we would want to be treated, just like in person. That is how technology can help us to be empathic.