The Foundering of Social Empathy

A couple friends came to visit two weeks ago. With my wife and I, they joined us in the living room to visit and catch up, and to otherwise enjoy each other's company as friends do. With their smart phones in hand, we engaged in idle chatter, but it was clear they were drawn as if by some spell to check the messages on their smart phones and see what was going on in their larger world. For a moment, I ceased my line of conversation and the room went quiet. They were totally absorbed in a world apart from the “real” world of our get-together in our living room.

If you share a space with people who aren't looking at their smart phones, you are all in that space together (unless someone is daydreaming). You are sharing a common base of experience... and it can be amazing to get on the same wave length as those in close proximity. That's why people go out to clubs, sporting events, and houses of worship – for the social rewards of just being with other people in some common experience.

But when you are with someone who is fixated on their smart phone, you have less of a feeling for what is going on with them. Their attention is not on the immediate reality you are sharing. Their moment is being curated by some faraway digital algorithm that is invisible to everyone else. You no longer share the same “real” experience. Since I have no way of seeing someone else's social media feed, I have lessened powers to empathize with what they think and feel. Because we are creatures that cannot focus well on two things at once, we cannot build any kind of unmolested commonality with others unless all phones are put away.

The ultimate result is an increasing loss of empathy with others in the modern world. But it is empathy, that ability to understand what other people are experiencing and why, and the ability to imagine being in another's place, that is fundamental to a healthy society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.

I still do not own a smart phone. The less time I spend on the phone and the less time I interact with some form of technology or media, the more time I have available for a direct interaction with other people and the natural world that surrounds us all. Perhaps, my sentiments can be easily written off as just old-school, but as I watch with sadness as people grow further and further apart, I think there may be something valuable in reminding the world of the way things used to be.