Empathy and the Internet

Gregg Knauss wrote this iPhone app called Romantimatic to, hold your breath, “remind the distracted or forgetful to text nice things to their significant other”!

As you might suspect, the app attracted a fair amount of criticism, wrote Knauss, “often in the language of the Web, by which I mean the most hyperbolic terms possible”.

Knauss wondered why there was any reaction at all?

“It’s not evil, by any sane definition of the word. It’s not hurtful. It does not do damage to the user or to others. Everyone who has argued so vehemently against it could have just as easily quietly noted its existence, decided it wasn’t for them, and moved on, without moral obligation or qualm.”

He also felt that a similar reaction would have never have come if he had written an app that advised people to eat less. And so he asks:

“Why is one type of self-improvement aid worse than the other?”

And concludes that:

“Those people who don’t need the help feel free to judge those who do. They judge us by our failures and not our desire to improve. They judge us by our tools and not what we can accomplish with them. They judge us by their own standards, without a breath given to the possibility that a different perspective might exist.”

A lack of empathy, in other words:

“Exposed to the entire spectrum of human enthusiasms (on the Internet), it’s basically impossible not to judge. Our empathy overloads and gives up and we sit, staring at the screen aghast, that somebody, somewhere might actually believe that what they’re doing is OK, is acceptable, is even appropriate. Everybody is somebody else’s monster.”

Add to that the high that comes from getting all righteous:

“What I’m talking about here is how addictive the righteousness that comes from that condemnation is, and how we will apparently turn to any source we can find for it — even when that source is not evil or harmful or part of any world we exist in or understand.”

Knauss hopes all this analysis will change him:

“I hope that it makes me a little more generous with my judgement, a little more kind with my opinion, a little more reserved with my disapproval.”

And concludes half tongue-in-cheek:

“Maybe there’s an app that can remind me. It looks like there’s a big market for it.”