Cultivating Empathy in the Digital Age
Disclaimer: This is an old article, originally written in December of 2023. It is being uploaded as an example of work I have done and because the core message is still relevant.
When we open our phones or turn on our television screens, we are often bombarded with desperate and heartbreaking images and stories from around the world. This is certainly the case with the ongoing news coverage of Israel and Palestine, a situation that can currently feel hopeless due to the sheer desperation of it all. At the time of writing this, calls for a humanitarian ceasefire have been constant and while Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did agree to a temporary truce, it has officially ended after a week, giving little breathing room to Palestinians in a dire humanitarian crisis. And while watching from the sidelines can make us feel powerless, it is important to remember as a student population to hold onto our empathy and our hope for all causes that we believe in and cultivate these feelings actively.
It is an indisputable fact that military action in Palestine has been disastrous for civilians and especially children, with the UN reporting that 160 children are killed every day in Palestine, with 30 Israeli child hostages also taken by Hamas at one time. And while this knowledge is easily found on the Internet, it can be easy to lose sight of the forest through the trees on social media if we are not careful. We know that what we see on social media is algorithmically curated to push content that maximises engagement from us, often by tugging on our heart strings for greatest effect. The digital age of activism has given us an unprecedented access to information and an ability to spread that information at a moment’s notice, which is exceptionally useful for any activist cause. However, the constant access to that information can leave people feeling numb from the human response of those who animated their activism initially, as doom scrolling leaves us with no breathing room to process what we see.
This is why attending my university’s recent remembrance display for the children of Gaza was such an effective gut punch for those who attended. It served a poignancy for those who attended that is hard to find on social media. By stripping it back to the basic human impact and forcing us to sit with it without emotional cacophony or distraction, the exhibition on the 28th November made itself affective yet simple, consisting of a small selection of photos of children killed in airstrikes on Gaza placed on the floor for people to walk through. There was also information about those affected and messages for the deceased on the walls. This exhibition did not allow you to cloud it with debates or scroll away to look at more digestible content- it brought it into reality for those on the sidelines, holding up a mirror to the limits of the social media space.
Empathy is often viewed as a natural and spontaneous reaction that people have towards others but in the modern era, it’s much more complicated than that.
Empathy is a skill that we have to actively nurture, especially when it comes to causes we care about. In an age where we are flooded with information to the point that we risk being desensitised, it is more important than ever that we cultivate our empathy by engaging with issues we care about in the real world as well as the social media space. For me, attending any protest for a cause I’m passionate about and sharing that physical space with the people it affects has given me a much better idea of how to fight for what I believe in and also underscored not just why it’s important but also why it’s possible. Seeing people physically coming together in solidarity necessarily generates empathy and connection, something the often-impersonal reach of social media fails to capture. True solidarity is cultivated not in isolation but in community. I finish this article in the hopes that it will encourage its readers to nurture their empathy, their engagement and their skills in both physical and digital spaces, for people and causes they care about.
