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found the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings. I fear, Gorry writes, that we will pay for our entry into the magical garden of cyberspace with a loss of empathy that our devotion to ephemeral images will diminish our readiness to care for those around us. Indeed, more time living virtually seems to result in poorer functioning in the real interpersonal world. In their September 1998 article in American Psychologist, Robert Kraut, Michael Patterson, Vicki Lundmark, Sara Kiesler, Tridas Mukopadhyay and William Scherlis write that the paradox of the Internet is that it is a social technology used for communication with individuals and groups, but it is associated with declines in social involvement and the psychological well-being that goes with social involvement. In a trenchant critique of media and technology, computer scientist and multimedia artist Jaron Lanier, often credited with popularizing the term virtual reality, takes this idea a step further, lamenting the end of human specialness and the decay in the belief in self created by the online world. In a piece for the Aug. 29, 2010, edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, he argues that technology uses us as conduits for information. When we forward a YouTube video or react to a Facebook post or tweet, we treat information as a free-standing substance, independent of human experience or perspective. Lanier, Innovator-in-Residence at University of Southern Californias Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, entreats his students not to tweet or blog during class, so that they might exist. After all, Lanier asks, If you are only a reector of information, are you really there?
Timothy L. Hulsey (Society
Vice President for Chapter Relations) is Associate Professor of Psychology and Dean of the Honors College at Virginia Commonwealth University. He co-authored the 2004 book Moral Cruelty (University Press of America), and articles he wrote or co-wrote have appeared in industry publications including the American Journal of Psychiatry and Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Hulsey earned psychology degrees from Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi (bachelors), Trinity University (masters), and University of Tennessee (doctoral) and served as a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth Medical School. Earlier in his career, he taught and directed the university honors program at Texas State University. Email him at tlhulsey@vcu.edu.

Empathy 2.0: Virtual Intimacy

By Timothy L. Hulsey

what humans have been doing since time began? Some advantages In his Sept. 5, 2008, New York Times magazine article, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, Clive Thompson quotes one mans experience as a regular user of social media: I feel like Im getting to something raw about my friends. Its like Ive got this heads-up display for them. Thompson goes on to note that, It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haleys group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if theyve never actually been apart. They dont need to ask, So, what have you been up to? because they already know. Instead, theyll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle. More disadvantages While admitting that ambient awareness may enhance preexisting relationships, skeptics like G. Anthony Gorry, a computer scientist at Rice University, point out that, In our life on the screen, we might know more and more about others and care less and less about them. (See Empathy in the Virtual World, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 31, 2009.) The concern is that more and more time in the virtual world corresponds necessarily to less and less time engaged in real interactions. In fact, a Feb. 16, 2000, New York Times article by John Markoff cites a study, conducted by Stanford University, that

he rapid growth in social media websites tells us that we like feeling connected. Facebook, for example, currently claims more than 400 million users. The average participant has 130 friends, receives eight friend requests per month, and is a member of 13 groups, according to the company. And some 106 million people now have Twitter accounts. Last year, upwards of 110 million individuals visited the website and generated in excess of 55 million tweets per day. We have come to accept virtual as real, online as social, and Facebook as face-toface. One effect has been a dramatic increase in our ability to know what those in our social circle are doing, what (and whom) they like and dislike, where (and with whom) they go and how they feel about pretty much everything. Called ambient awareness in technological circles, this new way of relating allows us to be knowledgeable about the lives of people we may or may not have actually met, without much effort. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Might this not be simply a 21st-century, technologically enhanced way of doing

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