The Arab Spring and Occupy Movement revealed that digital technology can help to channel and spread powerful emotions such as empathy and anger. But the revolts also showed that new technologies and social media platforms cannot in themselves sustain the emotional energy and practical action that mass movement require. Social media is superb tool for the short term objective of mobilising the people to take part in public protests and to communicate what was happening around the world, but it was less good at providing other essential ingredients for long term social movement success. No amount of tweeting could help the Occupy Movement clarify their very general political view, develop their leadership capacity and strategy, or maintain the passion of their supporters over a prolonged period. All these typically require face to face meeting and the hard, time-consuming work of collective organising. Moreover, lets not forget that while the web can generate intense empathic responses on a large scale-remember the Kony video?-it then often fails to convert them into widespread action in the real world. We could be sliding towards an era of what has been called “slacktivism”, where people delude themselves into thinking that watching a film clip or clicking an online petition constitutes authentic political activism.
Bringing the analysis back to our lives, how should we think about our personal relationship to digital technology? As we become increasingly hooked into the wired world, we need to ask ourselves how it is re-shaping our character and relationship. Is the internet offerings us “thin” hyper-connection at the expense of ‘thick’ friendship where empathy can thrive? Are we using social media in shellfish , self aggrandising ways that feed our nascent narcissism? We are still at the earliest stages of understanding how this new culture is affecting the human personality. While I would like to be more optimistic , there is mounting evidence that the digital revolution, in its present form, is falling to send us on the path towards an empathic civilisation. Rather, we may be witnessing a revival of the “Me decade “of the 1970s.Digital technology , it seems is amplifying the voice of homo
self- centricus.
