The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

Our new social-tech culture has made it seem acceptable to verbally attack “friends” and strangers alike in the most vulgar ways. Women and members of other marginalized groups are often especially vulnerable to these kinds of attacks on the internet, and I’ve had my fair share of random trolls calling me names and wishing fates upon me that I won’t print here. But get a little bit of notoriety or fame, and your “fair share” of trolling grows exponentially. Franchesca Ramsey, an activist and actress who gained

Opportunities to talk at each other are so common, and the energy to really listen is so limited, that it can feel like we’re spending most of our online time on the defense. Meanwhile, bad news seems worse than ever, and some days it seems like the only way to cope with the sensational headlines and endless tweets and posts about death and destruction around the world is to ignore them. In a world in which we’re each increasingly

the coveted “like” can be transformed into a bullying tool; aggressive liking—clicking “like” on everything a person posts or has ever posted—is a way of saying, “I’m watching you.” Ayub pointed out that in this increasingly hostile digital environment, individual differences seem to have more power.

“We no longer have to be face to face to showcase a power imbalance between two people.”

developers create new platforms, will they incorporate these concerns into the systems themselves? And in the meantime, will we learn to talk to each other with empathy?

we disagree with seem less human to us when we read their views than when we hear them spoken aloud.

us to move toward a system where we are operating on at least a shared pool of truth rather than separate truths we can all link to,” he told me. “I hope we will continue to pinpoint the best of the internet while also creating more and more spaces for us to move conversations offline, more spaces for us to speak one-on-one without being upvoted or downvoted.”

Clinical psychologist Lisa Flook and teacher Laura Pinger have studied the effects of a “kindness curriculum” on preschool-aged kids and found that twelve weeks of mindfulness and lessons about social-emotional development led to marked improvements compared to a control group, whose members were more selfish over time.

nunchi—a Korean cultural concept of being able to listen to and identify the moods of those around you. The way Gutierrez put it, there’s an expectation that one is “supremely aware of everything that’s happening with everybody in the group.” It’s an extreme form of empathy, Gutierrez said, and it informs culture in an ineffable way.

designing for slowness in an age of speed,”

ones that get made, and especially those that receive the biggest headlines, are about people and places that are most traditionally marginalized; most of the people making and viewing them are not from those communities.