We Live in Public (and the end of empathy)

In a very interesting email/post, Jason Calacanis analyzes the curious effects from mixing the Web 2.0 "social network" environment with video gaming. He concludes that many people have acquired "Internet Aspergers", a loss of empathy that reflects the unstinting brutality that winning at video games requires. It's an interesting juxtaposition of technological details that I had not come across--that kids who play video games and learn to dehumanize their "enemies" in order to "level up" easily maintain the same mental attitude when interacting with bloggers, facebook friends and journalists online.

A long time ago, during the Vietnam war, it suddenly dawned on me that the farther you live from a situation, the easier it is to have an opinion about it. Fewer details, more abstract and concrete analysis. People who had rarely left their hometowns in the midwest or northwest or northeast, knew the definitive solution to the difficulties of people living thousands of miles away with a different culture and a different economy and a different history. And usually the solution involved bombing the crap out of them. After all, they weren't people, just political problems, right?

Ed Bailey wrote a wonderful paper on the issue of fairness, in which he makes the to-me startling assessment that we can best achieve fairness among various parties by cognitive accuracy. That is, the more we know about somebody, the easier we can empathize with them.

This seems to suggest the underlying lie of "social networking"--while we may build up "communities" of "friends", we generally achieve only the most superficial connections, and as a result, we lack the cognitively accurate understanding of others that underlies empathy. At the same time, we have shoe-horned ourselves into a "relationship" that involves sharing our most personal details.

It seems like the ultimate cognitive dissonance--are we intimates or strangers? Do we share a bond or just a form of transmission? Are we "friends" or "frienemies"? Do we reach out to others for more information, or do we grasp at their attention but reject their humanity?