In today's times, people are becoming more and more heartless and self-absorbed. The question at hand is rather or not technology and the Internet are the problem. I would have to say yes! Empathy is, by definition, the experience of understanding another’s condition from their perspective. Commonly, empathy can be described as stepping into someone else’s shoes or seeing through their eyes. It is an ability to value and know what another individual may be experiencing or feeling. Psychologists call empathy a 'prosocial' behavior. It is essential in building close relationships and maintaining friendships. Sadly, many people lack the skill to emphasize due to childhood trauma, detachment from others, autism, brain damage, and as of late, social media or other reasoning. Artificial technology has caused us to become numb to pain and struggle because everyone wants to live their best life or go viral at any cost. When making choices, young people use a specific network in their temporal lobes (underneath the temples), while older (and more empathetic) people use the prefrontal rind - a region that preserver how our decisions affect others.
Noticing your first response and affliction to get some perspective on it is one strategy to push back technology's encounter on our imagination's aptitude to feeling compassion for others. Scientists have even pinpointed a specific area of the brain that controls this tendency toward offense of empathy and self-interest. When our brains turn off to dissociate from displeasing events, we lose a part of what determines our humanity. Technology is advancing to the point that we ourselves are becoming cyborgs emotionally. Women don't even cry over relationships like they used to before technology and social media were so advanced. Technology has advanced to the point that we have everything at our fingertips and from experience people become accustomed to things they see and experience often and being 'heartless' seems to be the trend. Before social media and technology, we felt more passionate about things because our emotions were raw and real. Through the decade as we are constantly bombarded with images of war and death we grow desensitized to the natural feelings we should feel.
Most of us live through some form of artificial intelligence such as laptops, phones, etc. In the prelude finding, Kirsch said there seems to be a strong correlation between gun violence and invoking the Second Amendment tongue of liberty and idol excite gun commerce over social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Over the decade, social media has created an illusion and a platform for a facade of perfect vigor. Many endeavor to reanimate the lives of those they see on social media platforms at any cost. People admire so much the millions of social media accounts full of avocados, tranquil landscapes, and professional-looking photos of people lounging at five-star hotels that they will give anything, including their morals, to achieve it. I have personally seen a fight break out and the first thing people did was grab their cell phones and start recording and posting the situation instead of trying to help calm the fight. People are obtaining thousands of online worshipers as they sell them beauty and lifestyles, the whole time losing sight of what is truly important.
In conclusion, the Internet is affecting the way we perceive things and feel empathy, and we can see this in the number of deaths published via social media every single day. We need to put down our phones and actually live in the moment, not through the lens of the moment. The Internet is a dangerous place and we need to stay mindful of that and be mindful of what we post. Technology will always be an important aspect of our society, but I think we should rely less on technology and depend more on each other. Manpower has always outlasted machines, and this has been proven throughout time. We cannot stop what is posted to social media, or what is posted to the Internet in general, but we can decide how much we expose ourselves to as well as how we react in situations where we should be feeling empathy and sympathy. We can rewire our brains and relearn things because that's the difference between humans and artificial intelligence. Although technology will continue to grow and advance, we will continue to produce it, and this is what makes us superior, but also inferior at the same time, our constant need to upgrade and improve.