How do you feel about the desensitization social media has about tragedy and how this affects our brains? I’ve studied media and communication and I’m super passionate about this topic.
The other day I was scrolling on Youtube shorts, and I saw a girl post a video about the air quality in new york due to the wildfires in Canada. The video was satire/comedy and she sped her video up while prancing around lip singing to yellow by coldplay or something. (Side note: why do people even find these sped up videos funny? They’re annoying)
I’m just wondering if you have an opinion on how desensitized people have become. Like at first glance I was like Oh that’s a bit funny! And then I caught myself and was like hang on this really happened as is currently affecting others… that’s horrible. I’ll scroll on my snapchat news and see murder case / true crime headings reading like fun little blurbs. And people do their makeup and profit off other peoples trauma for views like they’re professionals doing it and it’s so insulting. The list really goes ON.
Do you think some studies will start coming out soon about how our empathy levels are incredibly low or even developing our brains differently because of social media’s impact on empathy and being desensitized to so many things?
Sorry for the loaded question! I’m curious to see what you think.
Thank you for this question because I've been thinking about it for like, three days straight. At first I was inclined to be like, "well, no, I think the internet is fine and our worries about empathy are just a moral panic that we see with every new technology that's developed." And then I was inclined to be like, "people have definitely become less empathetic lately, and the internet is probably a big part of that." But I think the reality is that the internet is kind of neutral. More than anything, the internet is a tool that acts to magnify and intensify the way people already are. Some people use the internet to become more aware of other people and understand their unique situations; other people use it to be trolls.
The first thing I want to talk about here is the idea that people used to be more empathetic in the past. I just don't know if that's actually true. Blood sports- games in which people are violent towards one another on purpose as a form of entertainment- have existed for most of human history. Gladiator combat in Ancient Rome is a relatively popular example of this, and often ended in the death of a gladiator. Boxing is a sport that has historically been popular and continues to be popular to this day, despite the fact that it's just two people violently attacking one another. Lynchings used to be public spectacles, where the attendants often treated these as festive events, with food, family photos, and souvenirs. I don't know that I believe we were really more empathetic in the past at all. I think we've actually really improved on the "you can't torture, maim, or kill other people or animals for entertainment" front, especially since those types of things are generally banned from social media.
And like I was saying before, I do genuinely think that the internet can foster greater understanding and empathy towards marginalized groups. I know the struggles of all sorts of groups that I might never encounter in real life. I know how to be polite to people from a variety of different cultures that I might never experience. I've been posed with some really challenging philosophical questions through the content I've been exposed to online. I'm hearing the narratives of marginalized groups that I may have never otherwise heard, and I'm hearing it in their own words. That's incredibly valuable, and I think people who have grown up in the internet age don't fully appreciate how historically rare that actually is. Up until now, history has been written by the victors, the powerful, the oppressors. Now that narrative is democratized and widely available. That's huge in terms of its ability to build empathy and understanding if we choose to be open to it.
But, that same democratization can create problems. The first is that there's not really a distinction between in-group and out-group content anymore. It used to be that there was kind of a sense of, "well, I can say that about my own [group/family/situation] to people who understand, but you can't say that, because you're not part of it and you don't get it." People create content with their in-group in mind, but it often "breaches containment"- it's seen by people who aren't in that in-group. People who are living in New York and making jokes about the air quality situation in New York are usually making those jokes for other people in New York who are in their same situation. They're trying to lighten the mood of something scary. But the people who are seeing it aren't necessarily in New York; they're all over the world, and the context and emotional intention of that joke is kind of lost. There's an implicit assumption in these videos that you're starting from a place of understanding how horrible it is because you're living it, but that's often not true of the actual viewers. In your case, you saw a funny video and thought it was funny. If you had seen a serious video about the same situation, you probably would have been like, "oh shit, this is serious. I hope the people are okay." It's not necessarily a lack of empathy here but a lack of shared context in the way the information is being presented (or something like that?)
That brings us to problem two, which is compassion fatigue. More than ever before in history, we are constantly aware of every bad thing that has happened everywhere in the world, every single day. It used to be that you would get the newspaper and it would be focused mostly on local news, with some national headlines and a couple international headlines that were really important. The information we had about bad things that were happening were mostly things we could do something about. But now, that's not really the case, right? Today, I know that the Jenin refugee camp suffered massive damage following the Israeli army's biggest assault there in 20 years. I know the Palestinians fear that the situation will escalate. I know that Allison Mack, who ran the Nxivm cult, was released from prison after serving just two years of her sentence. I know that a suspect in a Philadelphia shooting was charged with the murder of five people, and that a Canadian man is facing terrorism charges over far-right videos, and that Japan has announced a controversial plan to release treated waste water from the Fukushima nuclear plant, and that Senegal has been facing a crisis because their President, Macky Sall, was threatening not to step down after the end of his second term, and that France is protesting police violence because a police officer shot and killed a French-Algerian teenager. And I can't do anything about any of this. I just know about it, and I have to care about it because I know about it.
And we've created this weird ecosystem online where everyone feels like they need to issue a PR type statement about whatever sociopolitical thing the internet cares about in the moment to show that they're a good person who is informed, even if they don't have a significant following and aren't impacted by the issue at hand. All of us are doing a weird kind of brand management for a brand that's just our own self, and we're managing it for the sake of our friends and family because we feel like we have to. And any time a person with a significant following does publish one of those statements, inevitably there are people badgering them about why they haven't spoken on the issue that they care about that's happening in their country. I just don't think that we as people have the emotional capacity to process that much information or care about that many things, especially when they're situations that we can't really do anything about, and especially when that situation will be replaced with something new within a few days. I think that's one of the reasons so many people feel helpless and disempowered right now. There's too much to fix but no real way for us to do it, especially in the time scale the internet provides.
So in this sense, I don't think that we're lacking empathy so much as we're required to be so empathetic that we've exhausted our capacity for it. There are more demands put upon us to be empathetic than ever before, and so we reach those moments of compassion fatigue more than ever before.
The other thing that I think is worth talking about here is the way in which the internet prioritizes extremes. The goal of algorithms is generally to get people to stay on the website longer, and the easiest way to do that is by getting them to feel a strong emotion. That's why clickbait works. It's also why the internet is invested in creating so much outrage. And the easiest way to continue getting people to feel outraged is to show them increasingly outrageous things, whether or not they're true. The internet kind of got 4chanified- like teenagers on 4chan, social media algorithms and article headline writers are trying to out-do one another by recommending or posting the most outrageous thing they can in order to capture the attention economy.
This is the part that concerns me the most with regards to the internet in general. Famously, Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after its algorithms amplified hate speech and Facebook failed to remove the inflammatory posts. Outrage = views = money for Facebook = more outrage bait being pushed = in the most extreme cases, genocide. And also, outrage = views = money for Facebook = more outrage bait being pushed = Donald Trump getting elected in the US. Outrage = views = money for Facebook = more outrage bait being pushed = people believing misinformation about medicine. And I think that creates a kind of interesting dynamic when it comes to empathy. Because in some sense, these people are very empathetic- they're outraged because of their empathy. They read a (fake) story about a child being victimized by a pediophilic trans teacher (or whatever) and panic because they have empathy for the children that they believe were victims. They're anti-immigration because they have empathy for the people who (they believe are) losing their jobs to immigrants. In the case of the Rohingya genocide, the Buddhist majority in Myanmar had empathy for the individuals that they believed were victimized by the Rohingya for their religious beliefs. These people were all wrong, but they're not lacking empathy. They're making a decision that an outside group isn't worthy of empathy because they've committed such heinous crimes. And that's a tale as old as time; just ask anyone who's Jewish.
I think what we need to be worried about is the ways in which the internet, and especially social media, can platform and expedite that process on a level that hasn't really been seen before. After the 2016 election, I used to really believe that we just needed to sit down with people across the aisle and have a civil, empathetic, rational conversation about the issues. But now I think that if that was ever possible, the time for it has passed. Misinformation, disinformation, and sensationalized information have become so rampant online that there's not really any way to have those discussions anymore because there's no way to agree on what is and isn't true. And unless we change something really quickly, that problem is just going to get worse with the advent of deepfake technologies and AI bots.
I feel like I've said a lot here but I haven't really come to any conclusions... but those are some of my thoughts, at least. I guess maybe it's that humans have always kind of sucked at being empathetic to people who are part of an out-group, but now we're just doing it on a global scale and reacting to threats that are (perceived to be) larger than ever before? Maybe it's that we should focus on strengthening and bettering our local communities as much as possible, and contributing on a global scale when we can? Maybe it's that media literacy is important, and we should always interact with news articles critically, even if they seem like they're a credible source?
