Text Bubbles and Avatars—What have we gained or lost when all our interactions are impersonal?

August 18

To join in conversation is to imagine another mind, to empathize, and to enjoy gesture, humor, and irony in the medium of talk.

in the past twenty years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past ten years. It is a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications. The study’s authors suggested (the decline) was due to students having less direct face-to-face contact with each other.

Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.

It has always been hard to sit down and say you’re sorry when you’ve made a mistake. Now we have alternatives that we find less stressful: We can send a photo with an annotation, or we can send a text or an email. We don’t have to apologize to each other; we can type, “I’m sorry.” And hit send. But face-to-face, you get to see that you have hurt the other person. The other person gets to see that you are upset. It is this realization that triggers the beginning of forgiveness. None of this happens with “I’m sorry,” hit send.

At the moment of remorse, you export the feeling rather than allowing a moment of insight. You displace an inner conflict without processing it; you send the feeling off on its way. A face-to-face apology is an occasion to practice empathic skills. If you are the penitent, you are called upon to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. And if you are the person receiving the apology, you, too, are asked to see things from the other side so that you can move toward empathy. In a digital connection, you can sidestep all this.

Somehow, Facebook gave her (a person quoted in the book) a way to think about other people as objects that can’t be hurt. And a way to think about a kind of cruelty that doesn’t count. We have learned that people who would never allow themselves to be bullies in person feel free to be aggressive and vulgar online. The presence of a face and a voice reminds us that we are talking to a person. Rules of civility usually apply. But when we communicate on screens, we experience a kind of disinhibition. Research tells us that social media decrease self-control just as they cause a momentary spike in self-confidence. This means that online we are tempted to behave in ways that part of us knows will hurt others, but we seem to stop caring.

• What do you think?
• Do you think we’re more or less empathetic than we used to be? (Or has humanity always been the same?)
• What have we gained or lost?

1 Samuel 25
There was a very important man who owned three thousand sheep and one thousand goats. At that time, he was shearing his sheep in Carmel. The man’s name was Nabal, and his wife’s name was Abigail. She was an intelligent and attractive woman, but her husband was a hard man who did evil things.
While in the wilderness, David heard that Nabal was shearing his sheep. So David sent ten servants, telling them, “Go up to Carmel. When you get to Nabal, greet him for me. Say this to him: ‘Peace to you, your household, and all that is yours! I’ve heard that you are now shearing sheep. As you know, your shepherds were with us in the wilderness. We didn’t mistreat them. Moreover, the whole time they were at Carmel, nothing of theirs went missing. Ask your servants; they will tell you the same. So please receive these young men favorably, because we’ve come on a special day. Please give whatever you have on hand to your servants and to your son David.’”

When David’s young men arrived, they said all this to Nabal on David’s behalf. Then they waited. But Nabal answered David’s servants, “Who is David? Who is Jesse’s son? There are all sorts of slaves running away from their masters these days. Why should I take my bread, my water, and the meat I’ve butchered for my shearers and give it to people who came here from who knows where?” So David’s young servants turned around and went back the way they came. When they arrived, they reported every word of this to David. Then David said to his soldiers, “All of you, strap on your swords!” So each of them strapped on their swords, and David did the same. Nearly four hundred men went up with David. Two hundred men remained back with the supplies.

One of Nabal’s servants told his wife Abigail. . . . Abigail quickly took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five sheep ready for cooking, five seahs of roasted grain, one hundred raisin cakes, and two hundred fig cakes. She loaded all this on donkeys and told her servants, “Go on ahead of me. I’ll be right behind you.” But she didn’t tell her husband Nabal.

As she was riding her donkey, going down a trail on the hillside, David and his soldiers appeared, descending toward her, and she met up with them. David had just been saying, “What a waste of time—guarding all this man’s stuff in the wilderness so that nothing of his went missing! He has repaid me evil instead of good! May God deal harshly with me, David, and worse still if I leave alive even one single one who urinates on a wall belonging to him come morning!”

When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off her donkey and fell facedown before him, bowing low to the ground. She fell at his feet and said, “Put the blame on me, my master! But please let me, your servant, speak to you directly. Please listen to what your servant has to say. Please, my master, pay no attention to this despicable man Nabal. But I myself, your servant, didn’t see the young men that you, my master, sent. I pledge, my master, as surely as the Lord lives and as you live, that the Lord has held you back from bloodshed and taking vengeance into your own hands! Here is a gift, which your servant has brought to my master. Please let it be given to the young men who follow you, my master. Please forgive any offense by your servant. When the Lord has done for my master all the good things he has promised you, and has installed you as Israel’s leader, don’t let this be a blot or burden on my master’s conscience, that you shed blood needlessly or that my master took vengeance into his own hands. When the Lord has done good things for my master, please remember your servant.”

David said to Abigail, “Bless the Lord God of Israel, who sent you to meet me today! And bless you and your good judgment for preventing me from shedding blood and taking vengeance into my own hands today! Otherwise, as surely as the Lord God of Israel lives—the one who kept me from hurting you—if you hadn’t come quickly and met up with me, there wouldn’t be one single one who urinates on a wall left come morning.” Then David accepted everything she had brought for him. “Return home in peace,” he told her. “Be assured that I’ve heard your request and have agreed to it.”

• Why did Abigail go to David in person?
• What do we learn about a face-to-face conversation from this story?
• What have we gained or lost when all our interactions are impersonal?
• What can the church do to move us closer toward empathy?

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