The Evils of Empathy

Legend has it that in the early years of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg told the News Feed developers: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” It sounds terrible, but what he likely meant was that, in this new medium—the Facebook News Feed—personal news should acquire the significance of traditional news and take its place. Essentially, the statement redefines the content of the news (in the News Feed) from focusing on public concerns to prioritizing personal interests.

At the moment, in the late 2000s, it was a revolutionary move. Focusing on close-range personal events instead of showing compassion for some terrible but distant suffering was received as a lack of empathy, allegedly promoted by the tycoons of new media. But Zuckerberg’s alleged comment was really about technical settings: The News Feed was supposed to prioritize personal over public content, to the degree of disregarding even significant information if it did not involve the user’s social graph (“friends”).

Focusing on personal matters at the cost of public concerns clearly set the social media news feeds apart from traditional media. This, not the lack of empathy, was the intention. In fact, social media have drastically increased the level of empathy in society—to the extent that empathy has begun to erode social relations.

Empathy as a Media Effect

Knowingly or not, Zuckerberg echoed a similar metaphor used by Adam Smith 250 years earlier. In his 1759 treatise “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith suggested that the prospect of losing one’s own little finger would disturb a man much more than the death of “a hundred millions of his brethren” swallowed by a sudden earthquake in China. Though this sounds callous, it makes sense: Of course personal, immediate experiences or even the anticipation of such experiences evoke much stronger emotions than distant events, no matter how dramatic. (Smith utilized this emotional distinction between personal and distant events to construct his theory on how morality almost “rationally” emerges from personal interests through sympathy and compassion.)

Comparing a distant disaster with a personal feeling, Smith could not have taken into account the emotional power of media portraying distant news. He simply didn’t have language for it. How would people in the 18th century learn about a disaster in China? In Smith’s words, “Let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity.” Obviously, the “intelligence” would have been delivered via rumors, personal correspondence or, at best, early newspapers.

Naturally, the strength of sympathetic feelings comes either from the immediacy of the drama or from the means of its mediation—in other words, from media. The emotional impact of news differs when conveyed through oral speech, reading, photos or television. The emotionality of the news is the product not so much of the news content, but rather of the medium through which this news is conveyed. In mediated communication, empathy is a media effect. By their very design, media determine the level of empathy in society; they also determine the distance empathy can reach. Additionally, by selectively transmitting content, media also define who gets our empathy, increasingly in terms of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, to use the terms economist Edward S. Herman and linguist Noam Chomsky coined in their Propaganda Model to describe the empathic discernment of the media.

For example, a textual medium favors conveying information, not emotion. Lacking the ability to represent content vividly, as oral narration or pictures would do, text requires the linear and sequential organization of content. The need to sift the content through the organizing efforts of the writer imparts a certain degree of rationality to the content. This is why text always favors rationality over emotionality, as compared with oral speech, for example. To make a text emotionally impactful, additional poetic efforts are required. Books, magazines and newspapers need to use pictures and graphic highlights to amplify the emotional impact of printed text. News about a horrifying yet distant disaster, delivered via text, would affect readers, of course—especially when distant news is scarce in general—but the rational and detached mediation of text always diminishes the potential for emotional perception.

Media-Induced Empathy Ended Industrial Wars and Rekindled Tribalism

Different media provide different levels of empathic involvement with content. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan used the term “empathic involvement” to describe the psychological effect of retribalization in the global village—the world united and agitated by electronic media. Unlike reading, television engages viewers emotionally rather than rationally. It recreates the oral mode of perceiving the world, in which people are immersed in a situation by watching and listening.  

It was not a coincidence, for instance, that the Vietnam War ended after the proliferation of television. Vivid images of atrocities fueled the anti-war movement. This did not happen with the somewhat similar war in Korea a decade earlier—TV hadn’t been there yet. Television, with its empathic power ended the era of the imperialist wars, the bloodiest ones in history. There have been no full-scale industrial wars after Vietnam. Instead, the era of “hybrid wars” began. The level of empathy maintained in society by the medium capable of broadcasting “live” pictures has rendered unacceptable the industrial butchering of armies and civilians. Full-scale war is no longer politically or morally accepted. Because of media, wars now try to disguise themselves as various forms of anti-terrorist or military “operations.”

Television immerses people in a mode of perception where they have to sympathize, admire, be angered, be frustrated and experience the entire spectrum of emotions. The same was the mode of perception in tribal orality. In tribal settings, however, empathic involvement served as a mechanism of survival. People had to be emotionally tuned-in for better collective interactions. Rapport was the foundation of cohesion and tribal unity. Today there is no survival need for people to physically synchronize immediate collective efforts while watching TV. Television restored the empathic involvement of orality, but only technically, due to its capacity for emotional immersion.

But this technicality had brought enormous social and cultural impact. Being just a media effect, empathic involvement has nevertheless reintroduced tribalism, to which it was a “natural” cognitive and social regulator. Empathic involvement has synchronized the emotions and attention of the audience and made these personal traits available for commodification. TV incites empathic involvement not only to capture viewers’ time and attention, but also to build their loyalty and even addiction, the most valuable assets in post-industrial capitalism. The loyalty of the masses to certain media consumption easily converts into various business models: You can sell something to a loyal audience, or sell a loyal audience to advertisers or politicians. Television made possible “affective economy,” in which Marx’s classical formula evolved into its post-industrial form: “money—affect—money.” 

As soon as the media effect of empathic involvement was commodified, it turned into a self-sustaining loop of positive feedback. The more empathic involvement was commercialized, the more it was produced. The commodification of empathic involvement caused “behavior modification”—the term that computer scientist Jaron Lanier suggested to substitute for “advertising.” Society was increasingly trained to be compassionate—by the medium.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s statement suggesting that a nearby event should receive higher priority in the News Feed than a distant tragedy was poorly received by the public. Its “technicality” was missed, but its alleged callousness was read. However, the technical intent behind this statement seemed to fail, too. Yes, social media started conditioning people to see publicly exposed personal news as more relevant in the News Feed than public news. But the result turned out to be unintended: Instead of simply focusing on the personal, the News Feed ended up personalizing any shared news, including public news. By technically prioritizing personal relevance over public concerns, this new medium made public concerns overly personal.

The Overproduction of Empathy

The effect was tectonic: Digital media made society even more empathetic than electronic media did. People learned to experience distant news not through detached text, as in the Gutenberg era, but in their personal agenda within their most intimate space of communication—the screens of their personal devices. Zuckerberg is lucky that this statement was attributed to him in the late 2000s, not now, in the early 2020s. With today’s level of mandatory empathy in society, he would have been destroyed for such an allusion.

Whereas television emotionally immersed people in news through watching and listening, social media added talking. The “emancipation of authorship” by the internet made people themselves into media. Now the social media users not only consume empathic involvement—they produce it.

The affective economy of television was based on the formula “money—affect—money”; social media have upgraded the formula to “money—engagement—money.” Television offered everyone empathic involvement in the shared public agenda; social media have made users demand empathic engagement from one another. Any activity on social media is a request for affirmation, submitted to others.

Seeing social media as a devilish device is common but wrong. Social media provide users a unique and precious service of accelerated self-actualization through the responses of others—the highest value in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The theory of Dunbar’s number posits that the primate brain can maintain meaningful connections with 120-150 individuals, roughly the size of a small tribe or village—or the number of acquaintances an individual could make in a lifetime. Social media overrode Dunbar’s number. Facebook, for instance, allows 5,000 friends and thousands of followers. Never before has humankind been able to create or maintain such a high amount of friendship.

But this explosion of socialization comes with a price. The cognitive capacities designed for 150 meaningful connections are overwhelmed. The social equilibrium based on slow, lifelong socialization is destroyed. On social media, empathic engagement is no longer an affordance—it’s a duty. As users are immersed in an environment where they not only demand responses from others but also are demanded to respond to others, anxiety becomes the basic emotional tone of interactions. The explosion of socialization has become the implosion of passive (or not so passive) aggression: The empathic demands from around the world have surged into the user’s perception, customized and amplified by algorithms and the user’s own network of friends.

The commodification of affect (by television) and engagement (by digital media) created empathy without unity. It retrieved the emotional involvement that was typical in an oral—tribal—society, but on the technological basis of a new medium that provides distant empathic involvement without any real personal connection and without any physical limitations of space and time. Social media tribes are virtual—most members have never met one another, never really liked one another and never needed to like one another for any practical purposes of interaction. Their fictional need for tribal integrity is induced by the medium that extracts their tribal identities for commodification and makes people think that their identities matter more than their deeds, that their identities are their deeds (as for social media business, they are). Empathy without unity amplifies animosity. People attack one another with their requests for affirmation, causing an empathy race in which empathy gets inevitably weaponized.

As Lanier suggested in his 2018 book “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” “Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.” It is indeed so, but not because social media lack empathy. Quite the opposite—social media compel users to empathic involvement. The resulting oversupply of empathy simply devalues it, leading to empathy policing by everyone toward one another, ensuing mass anger and polarization. Sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard noticed a similar phenomenon in 1981: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” The same dynamic is now seen on social media: We live in a world where there is more and more empathic involvement, and less and less real empathy.

If You Can’t Return to Text, Be a Cat

If the amount of empathy is predefined by the dominant medium, then what medium would slow down the overproduction of empathy in society? Text, of course. Reading isolates vision from the other senses and turns the sensory faculty of vision into the cognitive capacity of inner vision. Walter Ong, a scholar of literacy, called it the “inward turn.” Historically, the inward turn of literacy enabled individualism and thus destroyed the primeval tribal immersion of people. With the proliferation of writing, prehistoric tribal society came to an end.

Unlike the oral mind, the literate mind focuses on meaning and not on empathic synchronization with others. Written text is subject-matter-oriented, not relation-oriented. Empathy is not inherent in writing in the way that it is innate in both primary and digital orality. Society could have alleviated the overload of empathic involvement if it had returned to more reading, as it did in the Gutenberg era, called the Age of Reason not without reason.

But a return to text is impossible. Deep and long reading will never regain its position of dominance now that humans have tasted digital devices. Digital media are much more efficient than writing or print in communication, socialization and accumulation of knowledge. Most importantly, they are much more hormonally rewarding, as every click is supported by a dopamine micro-hit. No reading can compare with the annoying yet addictive pleasure of digital surfing, scrolling and clicking. Humankind will not be able to repeat that transition from relation-oriented orality to content-oriented literacy that happened in the Axial Age 2,500 years ago, when literacy started replacing orality. The media era of rationality has gone irrevocably.

Speculating about the loss of meaning due to oversupply of information in the 1980s, Baudrillard concluded that the system could only reproduce itself and escalate: “There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution.”

Contemplating the reasons for deleting one’s social media accounts, Lanier suggests a solution based on a metaphor of dogs’ and cats’ characters. Dogs are emotionally very responsive and amenable. They have no options other than dissolving into the collective behavior of a pack, most likely highly agitated. Be a cat, suggests Lanier. It means less empathic involvement. Being a cat is a substitute for reading when reading is gone.