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

Social technology is ostensibly about connecting people, but it doesn’t often foster the empathy that’s needed for real human connection.

Franchesca Ramsey, an activist and actress who gained fame from a series of viral YouTube videos, writes about this poignantly in her book Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist.

Journalist and conversational expert Celeste Headlee has some ideas. In 2017 she published a whole book about fixing conversations, called We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. When I called her to discuss it, she wanted to make one thing clear up front: “We are about to get a whole bunch of books and think pieces that blame tech

people’s level of empathy seems to correlate with their position in society.

compassion is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling with them.

When I hear about a new app, gadget, or tech-based service, I try to ask myself the following questions: How might this improve my life or experience, or those of others? What is the potential for it to be manipulated, and are there safeguards? Is there incentive for the people in charge to monitor this—do they have skin in the game? And ultimately

For those of us who have lived much of our lives online, giving up on the possibility of empathic connection via technology doesn’t feel like a real option.

every time someone likes or comments on one of our posts—their magic of creating bridges is sometimes overpowered by their capacity to help us burn them.

millennials. One of the most prominent voices sounding the alarm about the connections between technology and a lack of empathy is probably Sherry Turkle, a researcher, writer, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has compared the impact of technology on our ability to communicate and empathize with one another to environ