Empathy in a Virtual World

We suffer today I believe from a lack of connection with each other. This is
common knowledge; so common in fact, that it may not even be true. It may
be that we are overconnected, for all I know.
Barthelme, Snow White
Living in Platos Cave
We live increasingly on the screen, deeply engaged with the patterns of light and energy
upon which so much of modern life depends. At work, we turn our backs to our coworkers,
immersing ourselves in the flood of information engendered by countless computersan
engagement that continues well beyond the end of the workday. On the streets, computers tag
along with us, many disguising themselves as cameras, phones or music players. Still others,
embedded in video displays, wait at home or in the theater. They are all parts of an enormous
electronic web woven on wires or more recently only air. We understandably marvel at what we
can do with all this technology. We turn less attention, however, to what the technology may be
doing to us.
Recall Platos Allegory of the Cave in which Socrates tells of prisoners rigidly chained in a
cave facing a wall with a fire burning brightly behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners,
other people carry statues of animals, plants and other things back and forth on a walkway.
Held fast, the prisoners see only shadows on the wall and hear only echos of the voices behind
them. Mistaking these for reality, the prisoners vie with one another to name the shadowy
shapes, and they judge one another by their facility for quickly recognizing the images.
A sorry scene you say, a pale imitation of what life should be. In all of us, the same sentiment
quickly arises: these prisoners are being cruelly punished. We dont need philosophers or
scientists to tell us that without true social interaction, we wouldnt be human. Of course, in our
daily lives we are not in chains. We have many opportunities for face-to-face engagement with
others. Also an abrupt jump from that cave to the twenty-first century misses monumental
developments in human consciousness induced by technology. The path from oral culture to
scribal, print and now electronic culture was forged by products of human inventiveness. Our
electronic web continues one of the profound changes in our cultureand in usduring this

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1330478

journey: the emergence of disembodied sociability. Newspapers, books, art, movies, television
and other media have thrust us, if only imaginatively, into the lives of others far removed. Their
experiences fascinate us, and what we learn of them stirs our emotions, even when those others
are present to us only in lines of text or in flickering on a screen. The technology of Socrates
cave with its statues and firelight is primitive compared to our multimedia computers, which offer
us ever such rich ways to interact with real and imagined others.
Computers are the latest and most protean of what Haraway calls machines of sunshine,
which, although they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum,
can erode the boundaries between reality and artifice, beguiling us with increasingly elaborate
settings for work, entertainment and escape. (6) Through their auspices, we meet with people
far away, enter complex simulations, collaborate on projects and access previously
unimaginable stores of information and knowledge. With these devices, many of us have even
created entirely new identities for ourselves. So if he were wandering the halls of our workplaces
or visiting our homes, Socrates would undoubtedly be amazed, but still he might make us a bit
uncomfortable with questions about the role these machines play in modern life. Doesnt our
technology bind us in its own subtle ways?
Growing intimacy with these machines promises expansive and multifaceted lives, but how
is the advance of information technology affecting our intimacy with people? Will the screen soon
replace the face-to-face community as the primary setting for social interaction? If so, at what
cost? While we can connect electronically with countless people in novel ways, we reach most of
them only at a vague, digitally prescribed distance. Yet many people now feel closer to others in
cyberspace than to those who live next door. We pitied the inhabitants of the cave whose only
social interaction came from besting one another in the quick identification of the images
crossing the wall. Are we, however, so intent on the ephemeral images on our television, movie
and computer screens, also turning our backs on true social life, creating but a pale reflection of
a more satisfying and fulfilling activity that once knit people together?
Here I want to address these questions as they pertain to empathyour understanding and
sharing the feelings of others. Our empathy has deep roots in our biology; without it we could
not anticipate the reactions of others to what we do and to use those reactions to tailor our
behavior to various social situations. (2) What then of our inborn capacity to sense the inner life
of others as digital technology increasingly mediates our experience? Will it change our
readiness to care for those around us?
The technologies of modern life have brought us many opportunities to regard the

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1330478

sufferings of others from afar. (13) We might predict, therefore, an increase in understanding,
tolerance and perhaps even empathy as technology makes more permeable the boundaries
that presently divide communities and nations. Such benefits would surely be a boon to our
increasingly interdependent and conflicted world. (8) A more ominous response, however, is
that modern life is a diet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually
become habituated. (11) By numbing our emotions, our intimacy with machines may distance
us from our fellow humans, attenuating our natural empathetic responses to the misfortunes and
suffering of others. In our life on the screen, we might know more and more about the lives of
other people and care less and less about them.
Caring for Others
What is the source of our feelings for othersthe pity for the sorrowful, anguish for the
miserable, joy for the successful that Adam Smith called fellow feeling? Perhaps it is simply in
our nature to respond emotionally to the circumstances of those around us. Indeed, empathy
does seem to come naturally to us; our emotional responses arise swiftly and unbidden,
particularly in the presence of those bearing the weight of injury, loss, fear or despair. We might,
therefore, expect our natural sympathy and compassion to be impervious to any corrosion by
modern life. For every heartwarming account of compassion, aid and sacrifice, however, the
daily news offers a story of indifference, hatred or abuse that illuminates a second, disturbing
aspect of our nature: a willingness to advance our individual interests at the expense of others,
however great the cost. Distressingly frequent, deeply unsettling reports seem to confirm the
view of pessimists like Hobbes, who attributed our ostensibly compassionate acts to strict
social control that alone keep our brutish self-interest in check. If so, then changes in the way we
interact with one another, particularly the loss of that social control, could undermine our caring
and concern for one another.
Evolutionary theory and neuroscience suggest truth in both positions. Over millions of years,
beginning even before the emergence of Homo sapiens, natural selection shaped the brains
and behavior of our primate forebears to serve both self and others. By grouping, they could
better meet environmental challenges and promote their reproductive success. Individuals still
cared most for their own prospects and those of their kin, but with increasing social integration
demanded care for the interests of the community. Natural selection, therefore, favored primates
that could sense the intentions and needs of others of their kind.
Just as natural selection fostered in our ancestors instinctive fear of spiders and snakes,
and disgust for rotten food, it also instilled in them sensitivity to the emotions and behavior of

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others that proved the underpinning of their heightened sociability. They responded instinctively
to body language, not only gross actions, but as well by the twitch of an eye, tremor of a hand,
tensing of a leg, even the dilation of a pupilall subtle indicators of the intent of the brain within
the body observed. With a nuanced awareness of expressions of intent, primates could forge
alliances, exchange favors, achieve status and even deceive. Those who were particularly
skilled in working the crowd gained added advantages for themselves and their offspring
and thus the blessing of natural selection. Over time, primate sociability became a powerful
adjunct to a fierce focus on self.
Genetic adaptations to the demands of that far earlier time still lurk beneath our current
culture. Ancient emotional centers in our brains shape and color many of our social interactions,
often escaping our introspection and volitional control. Our brains remain highly attuned to what is
unsaidor what is spoken in the language of the body. But long ago, the emergence of
imagination set us on the path to what J. K. Rowling characterized as understanding without
having experienced, to thinking ourselves into other peoples minds and places. First the
Muses inspired early singers and poets to entwine fiction and empathy. (11) Then with the
invention of writing and later printing, this connection broadened and deepened.
Imagination, Technology and Empathy
Unlike speaking to which we are born, reading is a skill we have to acquire. Practice shapes
our brains to accommodate the linearity and fixity of text. Literacy repays this effort by
introducing us to a multitude of fictional others whose lives can entertain and edify. One hundred
years ago, Joseph Conrad praised the novel as the preeminent link between imagination and
empathy, for through it one may attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented
vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling
of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain
fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world. (1) But we pay a price
for these riches. Text opens a new, solitary pathway for the imagination, but it makes it harder to
follow the older oral way. Oral cultures have expressive means of conveying fictions to which
we, with our brains so accommodated to text, may be unresponsive. Having become readers of
the Odyssey, for example, we cannot fully share the experience of audience in ancient Greece
who heard a rhapsode sing the travels of Odysseus.
Today digital technology is supplanting the written word with its own kind of literacy. A
computer screen is our window on the world; and a network, our magic portal to places and
lives far and wide. Our brains are now adapting to new kinetics, where life rushes on us at a

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prodigious rate. Our situation is like that of a man in a comedy act who has to keep plates
spinning atop a row of poles. He moves from one pole to another, giving each just enough spin
to keep its plate aloftand no more, for others are teetering. From time to time, an assistant
adds a new pole and plate, and soon he must conduct his act on the dead run. (4)
We call our act multitasking. We shuttle from email to hyperlinks to phone calls, cobbling
together ideas, suggestions and advice to keep our work and home life uprightwhile the pace
of our act accelerates. Technology crowds our lives with the experiences of many others
painful, sorrowful, lonely, exuberant, ordinaryeach claiming a bit of our attention and tugging
on our empathetic faculty. Our intense curiosity about the lives of others makes us responsive to
these claims, drawing us ever more deeply into technologys version of Platos cave.
Habitual readers say that by introducing us to fictional others, novels make us more
sensitive to the feelings of real people. With its jumble of streaming video, elaborate games,
social networks, news reports, fiction, and gossip, cyberspace could coax us to greater regard
for the unfortunate and oppressed. The widespread grief that followed the death of Princess
Diana is a vivid example of the power of technologys Muses to extend the reach of anothers
mythical life into our own. As it increases its hold on our imaginations, perhaps digital technology
will do what novels are said to do: make us a more compassionate, nicer species.
Long ago, Hesiod observed that the Muses have the power to make false things seem true.
This, of course, is how they sustain fiction. Today, however, technology offers expansive new
ways to beguile our imaginations. Movies, television advertising and even prints in magazines
depict tantalizing, unreal worlds, which offer, if we will suspend our disbelief, knowledge at
bargain pricesa semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom. (11) Even when we know
what we see cannot be, the falsity of our experience may not reduce our empathetic response,
which is more automatic than considered. Our brains, seeking stimulation rather than
knowledge, may find more engagement in a montage of simulated joys, sorrows and agonies
than in the lives of real people and events.
In the theater, for example, watching the great Titanic slowly sinkits passengers
desperately seeking safetywe suffer with them and fear for their fate. We know the sinking is a
fabricationan amalgamation of the real and the artificialeven if we do not know how the two
are blended. Our brains, however, care little about the way technology forms the disparate
parts into a seamless whole; for them it is experience, not analysis, that counts, and for a few
minutes, the sinking is real. We care deeply for those simulated people in their simulated peril.
For thousands of years, of course, artists have drawn us into imaginative worlds where our

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empathetic faculties find the stimulation they crave. But when their performances were finished,
their stories ended, their books read or their movies seen, we returned to our everyday lives
and to our friends and neighbors. Now digital technology is erasing the boundary between the
magic and the mundane. (5) The computer has opened for us not just a diversion or a lesson,
but a fantastic life in which we can indulge our interests with the click of a link, where we can be
any place at any time, where increasingly we can be who we want to be.
Technology is replacing the traditional social structures of the face-to-face community with
more fluid electronic arenas for gossip, preening and posturing. FaceBook and MySpace
members strut their stuff with embellished self-descriptions and accumulations of friends
from far and wide. These would mean little, if we were not so sensitive to trappings of rank, so
irresistibly drawn to assess, judge and categorize others. Repeated encounters with those who
present themselves as a blend of the actual and the fantasized alter our expectations of
trustworthiness and reciprocity. Absent face-to-face interaction, there seems little need to
adhere to social conventions of the past. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier,
but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim,
they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. (9)
Technologys promiscuous mixing of the actual and the invented undermines our belief in the
fact of suffering. Updike said the Internet is chewing up books, casting fragments adrift on an
electronic flood. (14) We might say the same of lives; technology is cutting out pieces and
offering them isolated from their natural context. Just as a dismembered novel loses
accountability and intimacy, so too does a person who appears only as fragments. It takes little
to arouse our emotions. (7) Trashy novels, gossipy and wildly fantastic magazines at the
supermarket checkout, clips on the nightly news, pornographic images and many other
fragments of real or invented lives stir our imaginations and trigger spontaneous emotional
involvement. Anothers startling, confusing, alarming experience is reduced to grist for the mill of
our emotions, where our inclinations, history, prejudices and aesthetics grind it to our liking.
If the virtual trumps the real, the joy and suffering that engages our brains may be largely
simulated. Immersive environments will enable us to participate in complex simulations of social
life, letting us interact with virtual characters and influence their lives, but be free to disengage at
any time without consequence. With technology as a remote control, we can to tune in emotional
stimulation we crave and tune out that which we find unpleasant or disturbing. (4) The
unintended consequence of this power, however, may be passivity, for as Sontag said,
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action or it withers. (13)

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A century ago, E. M. Forster envisioned a time when a powerful Machine would mediate all
experience, much as artificial intelligence sustains the Matrix in recent films. His Machine had
woven an electronic garment that had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture,
sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at
will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body.
Over time, however, technology had imprisoned humanity in an electronic cave where the body
had become white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had
grasped the stars. (3) The sudden failure of the Machine doomed its dependents who knew no
other life but that on the screen.
Over thousands of years, cultures have used art and its technologies to promote social wellbeing. But the very fullness of life on the screen may now thwart this intent. Multitudinous and
multifaceted appeals to our emotions may so absorb us that we have no energy to devote to
others. We want the frightened to be comforted; the sick, healed; the defenseless, protected,
but in the virtual world, consequential actions are few. Feelings without deeds may be the
colorless, sloshing stirrings derided by Forster. If natural selection endowed us with a limited
capacity to empathize with others, then technologys parade of fragmented lives may sap us of
feeling. Like profligate shoppers, who having squandered our money on trinkets that our eye,
we may have nothing left to spend for anything truly worthy.
The Future of Empathy
Because our biology drives our venture into cyberspace, we can expect a deepening
intimacy with our machines of sunshine. Digital technology gives todays Muses new ways to
meet our brains incessant demands for emotional stimulationto forge fetters that bind us to
our electronic environments. If our technology remains robust, we may avoid the catastrophic
failure imagined by Forster, but what of empathy in this increasingly virtual world?
In Platos Republic, Socrates argued that poetry, through its power to stir our emotions and
appeal to our baser inclinations, undermines true understanding. So he proposed to exclude it
from the education of the elite in his ideal community. For them, philosophy, an arduous, but
ultimately more reliable mode of thinking, would be the path to understanding. Today our
increasingly seductive technologies would alarm him even more; he would surely limit the
engagement of his elite with multimedia fabrications. Socrates recognized, however, art is the
vehicle through which society guides the many to good citizenship. He anticipated the
arguments of later advocates of novel reading in the promotion of empathy: the right artistic
creationsthe right fictionswill raise aspirations, enhance fellow feeling and improve behavior.

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So despite his reservations, Socrates might see new opportunities for artists and teachers to
encourage sympathy and care for others.
Digital technology, however, has fostered a radical egalitarianism that has displaced
authorities traditionally empowered to cultivate and guide our feelings for one another. It has
made Muses of us all. In turn, we have created the cacophony of the Internet, which conveys
not a single tradition, but a flood of fragments, which can inform us of much, but can teach us
little. In this chaos, we may sense an ominous possibility. Natural selection embedded our
dogged pursuit of our own interests in a matrix of sociability. Once we live disembodied lives,
where identity is largely an imaginative construction, will falsehood predominate? Will false
identities free us to conceal our true intentions, to pursue our own selfish interests more
aggressively? It would be deeply distressing, if digital technology, which offers so many
opportunities for liberation, liberated some of our worst inclinations and behaviors from existing
social restraints.
On the other hand, stories of the imagined lives of others have guided empathy for
thousands of years. Over time, different modes of communicationsongs, poems and novels
have elevated some ways of understanding over others. Reading preempted oral performance,
and now multimedia is pushing reading aside. At each transition, masters of the older mode
scorned the new and vigorously, but fruitlessly resisted it. Those who embraced the new found
powerful ways to convey their imaginative conceptions. Now technology is dramatically
changing the path to Conrads permanently enduring part of our being. If we would foster
empathy we must change as well. We may have to jettison old habits of thought and avoid a
debilitating yearning for the past. Perhaps, as McLuhan argued, we cannot drive into the future
looking in the rear view mirror. But we can remember the road we have traveled. Our traditions
embody much from our past that is important to our society, and we should find anchors them in
the digital flood.

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References
1. Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the Narcissus. City: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1960.
2. Davis, Mark. Empathy. Boulder: WestviewPress, 1996.
3. Forster, E. M. The Machine Stops. City: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
4. Gorry, G. Anthony, As simple as possible, but not simpler. Comm. ACM, 48:9. 2005.
5. Gorry, G. Anthony. At the gates of a magical garden: life in the digital age. The New
Atlantic. (Forthcoming)
6. Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Rutledge, 1991.
7. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University
Press, 2007.
8. Manney, P.J. Empathy in the Time of Technology: How storytelling is the key to
empathy. http://www.pj-manney.com/empathy.html (retrieved 2007)
9. Rosen, C. Virtual Friendship and the new narcissism. The New Atlantis, Number 17,
Summer 2007.
10. Rosen, C. The Myth of Multitasking. The New Atlantis, Number 20, Spring 2008.
11. Rowling, J. K. The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.
Harvard University Commencement Speech, June 2008.
http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-theimportance-imagination
12. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador USA, 2001
13. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003.
14. Updike, John. The end of authorship. The New York Times, June 25, 2006.

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