Marena Beale
Professor Shelley
English Composition 110
November 7, 2023
The Internet
When it comes to being a good, helpful, communicative person, you need to be able to feel for someone. You must be able to step out of your own bubble and into someone else’s shoes in order to be a compassionate, caring, sympathetic individual. Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. Being empathetic also comes with being vulnerable. Being able to show a little uncomfortability and listen to someone, whether they are cheerful or upset, can help improve any relationship. In order to have these relationships, they must form outside of the technological world, face to face. However, the skill of being empathetic is being lost in our upcoming generations, and we can blame this on the internet. Kids now are growing up in a digital age, and because of this, they are losing the ability to make real connections with individuals beyond a screen. “The Empathy Diaries”, by Sherry Turkle, and “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova both demonstrate how the internet has affected our empathy and our friendships.
This skill is vital for our connections. Not only in romantic relations, but with our friendships too, as well as our family. In order to have meaningful, deeper connections, we need to listen and feel for the people we are close with. Although it is important to help those you feel closer to, it is also necessary to help those we aren’t as close to as well. Being able to empathize with anyone is an important skill. By being able to connect with anyone, we can live more fulfilling lives. We can be less judgemental. We can slow down. We can make more and more relationships. All thanks to being able to feel for someone and get out of our own heads.
Empathy enables us to be selfless. It helps us learn to care for others. In order to cultivate the skill of empathy, we must let our guards drop down and practice it. When talking to someone, we need to actively be aware of how to show we care. By actively trying and actively listening, we can improve our skills and be better, more caring, and more helpful people. When listening to someone, we must be thinking, “how can I help right now? What does this person need?” By doing that, we are already practicing empathy.
Our problem as a society is losing the ability to feel empathy. We are now in a world where we are constantly surrounded by social media. Between online homework assignments and media being the only way our friends and family communicate, the internet is being shoved down our throats wherever we go. In the article, “The Empathy Diaries”, by Sherry Turkle, she explains how we are so used to technology that we are losing our person to person skills, including empathy. “We hide from each other even as we’re constantly connected to each other. For on our screens, we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be” (Turkle, 344). Even though we are able to contact each other at the touch of a button, we are still disconnected. Turkle also discusses how she was invited on a retreat with the Holbrooke School in New York. The dean of the school said they were watching their students make acquaintances, but not real connections. “It is a struggle to get children to talk to each other in class, to directly address each other…And one teacher observes; the [students] sit in the dining hall and look at their phones” (Turkle, 345). When these students stare at their devices instead of having conversations with each other, they are preventing themselves from being able to make meaningful relationships in the future. In order to get well paying jobs, or even get into a good school, you need to have social skills. Being able to make true, deep connections with people will help everyone grow, and we will adapt as a society
Another article that shows how the internet has affected our relationships is “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova. In this piece, she illustrates the idea of how the Dunbar number works, as well as how children now are being raised in a virtual world. The Dunbar number is “…the theoretical number of friends we can really have, and the ways in which social networking is affecting not only this number but also socialization itself” (Emerging, 190). However, now these numbers might be shrinking because of our relationships forming on social media rather than in person. Nicole Ellison, a researcher from Michigan State University, surveyed a group of random undergraduate students about how they use Facebook. “…she found that while their median number of Facebook friends was three hundred, they only counted an average of seventy-five as actual friends” (Konnikova, 192). These “friends” we have on social media are not solid relationships. They are more of a following; people we know through other people.
Due to the new digital age that our current generation and future ones are growing up in, communication skills are suffering. Students need to learn how to be empathetic and caring, as well as learn how to depend less on the internet as a way to make connections.
