Social Networking and the Brain: Continuous Partial Empathy?

Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans. It should come as no surprise, then, that social Web technologies have a complex relationship with brain function. When these platforms work in concert with our social brains, they can enable persistent relationships or provide emotional/social augmentation. When social web technologies clash with brain function, however, the results can be surprising.

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Posted by hector  on  04/20  at  04:23 PM

Mr. Cascio's main point is a very good one: "What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration."

Maybe what is needed to improve this situation is to persuade our friends to take out just one day a week where no communication technology is used.

Posted by sniffcode.com  on  04/21  at  08:39 AM

This conclusion seems problematic for a number of reasons. Our ability to empathize in a media environment may be from an over saturation of images from media, versus the flash encounters. Sure, our brains may have evolved to recognize and register pain in others but empathy as a by-product certainly isn't ubiquitous. Teenagers who indulge in fight clubs seem to have tuned out all empathy when seeing another human being being pummeled.

Empathy seems to be more a question of cultural learning versus a question of physiology. For instance, most Americans feel empathy for the lives of other Americans, especially in the case of the Iraq war. Not much is said about the lives of Iraqi citizens whose death toll is in the six figure range.

This kind of brain study seems dubious to me. I can't see how we can form too many "one size fits all" conclusions about our WetWare.

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