Here’s part three of my essay on caring with/through twitter. In part one, I introduce two twitter projects, Angie Jackson’s live-tweeting of her abortion and Steph Herold’s creation of the #ihadanabortion hashtag, and suggest that they are examples of using twitter to care about, for and with others. In part two, I provide an overview of the main critiques of these projects. Now, in this post, I will discuss more general critiques of twitter as discouraging ethical engagement and empathy.
Does twitter make us unethical?
While critics of Angie Jackson’s live-tweeting and Steph Herold’s #ihadanabortion hashtag tended to focus on the political and moral impact of tweeting about abortions, we can also link their charges against twitter as too trivial, too concerned with inappropriate oversharing and not meaningful enough with some more general critiques of twitter and its (lack of) ethical value.
Many critics are skeptical of twitter’s ethical potential. Peggy Orenstein worries that “when every thought is externalized” and “when we reflexively post each feeling,” we lose insight, reflection and, possibly empathy. Bill Keller echoes Orenstein’s concerns, writing that new technologies like twitter “may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, a genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity” (Keller 2). Central to their concerns is the fate of empathy within the twitter age. Both believe that empathy is essential for being engaged, reflective and ethical citizens. And both caution that twitter is contributing to its erosion because it encourages people to be self-centered, superficial and apathetic to the experiences or wants and needs of others.
To support her case against twitter, Orenstein draws upon the findings of a recent study by the University of Michigan. In this study, researchers evaluated college students on seventy-two different campuses between 1979 and 2009 and determined that a sharp decline in empathy, particularly in terms of concern for others and the ability to take on others’ perspectives, has occurred since 2000. In evaluating the causes of this decline, Konrath et. al propose that the students’ increased time online, particularly in social media spaces like facebook or twitter, has possibly been a factor. As students spend more time online, the authors argue, their offline engagements and relationships have suffered; students are less able to effectively interact with others offline, they spend less time in offline activities, and they have less close friends offline with which to share their private feelings (188). Additionally, social media’s overemphasis on self-expression and individual wants and needs coupled with its overabundance of personal accounts of pain and violence, could be fueling the narcissism of “Generation Me” and desensitizing them to the suffering of others (187).
Both Orenstein and Konrath et. al speculate that a decline in empathy is at least partly the result of social media. However, this conclusion, which is based only on anecdotal evidence1, does not account for the ways in which using social media like twitter might actually allow for users to be more, as opposed to less, empathetic. In Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, Deanna Zandt argues that using social media to share information and find community provides opportunities for not only paying attention to others, but also sharing in their stories. In contrast to Orenstein and Konrath et. al, Zandt claims that social media provides us with new ways in which to share our stories with each other, to build up trust and understanding, to individually and collectively become aware of other ways of living and thinking, and to expand our networks of connections. As a result, “we’re becoming more connected, and thus have the capacity to be more empathetic.” This empathy, she continues, “will lead us away from the isolation and resulting apathy that we’ve experienced as a culture” (40).
Zandt’s suggestion that social media could increase our capacity for empathy is evidenced in Jackson’s and Herold’s twitter projects. Both Jackson and Herold used twitter to spread awareness about people’s experiences with abortion and to provide twitter users with access to stories to which they may not have previously been exposed. Angie Jackson aimed to demystify the physical process of having an abortion for others and to let them know that it is not nearly as scary as she had imagined. And Steph Herold wanted to destigmatize abortion and create a space where people could share their stories and make visible how abortion is not the “sin of a few bad woman,” but “‘a regular part of women’s lives.’”
In both cases, tweeting about abortion was about spreading awareness and making those experiences visible that have been rendered invisible by mainstream media. It was about initiating conversations on a difficult and painful topic and enabling twitter users to have access to ideas, feelings, experiences and stories that they might not find in other online or offline spaces. It was about cultivating an awareness and a caring for these people and their experiences and providing a wide range of folks—those who have had abortions, those who haven’t, those who are opposed to abortion, those who only want to hear “certain” stories about having an abortion—a space to develop empathy and to share in the stories of those whose abortion experiences usually do not get heard and are devalued, dismissed and/or ignored. And, it was about providing a means for people who have had or were contemplating having an abortion to connect with and care for and provide support for each other. For all of these reasons, Jackson’s live-tweet and Herold’s #hashtag project made possible multiple expressions of empathy (and more) in caring about, caring for and caring with other twitter users.
1 In their discussion of the loss of empathy among college students, the authors merely speculate on possible causes. Without any studies to back them up, Konrath et. al can only suggest that an increase in social media might be connected to a loss of empathy. Peggy Orenstein is also careful to only suggest that there is a link. She writes: “researchers at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found a drop in that trait, with the sharpest decline occurring since 2000. Social media may not have instigated that trend, but by encouraging self-promotion over self-awareness, they may well be accelerating it.”


