Final Thoughts- Our General Lack of Empathy and Cell Phone Use

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"Reclaiming Conversation" by Sherry Turkle could possibly hold one answer to the question, "How can we become more empathetic and how can we teach others to be more empathetic?"
Is it really as simple as putting down our mobile devices and having face to face conversations. How does this teach us empathy? In an interview with the author in 2015 from The Atlantic magazine, she says,

 "The empathy that I’m talking about is a psychological capacity to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what they are going through. It has neurological underpinnings—we know that we’re “wired” to do it, because when you put young people in a summer camp where there are no devices, within five days their capacity to watch a scene, and then successfully identify what the people in the scene might be feeling, begins to go back up again from being depressed when they first arrived, armed with their devices. We suppress this capacity by putting ourselves in environments where we’re not looking at each other in the eye, not sticking with the other person long enough or hard enough to follow what they’re feeling.
Putting the mobile devices down is a technique that may be more difficult for some than others but it could definitely be a starting point. We can help our students with this by making sure their cell phones are completely out of sight while having class discussions. We can also enforce the 'no phone rule' on ourselves when we are in the company of others. At least it would be a start. 

Comments

  1. NazAugust 2, 2020 at 9:25 PM

    I think most children receive their first cell phone before fully developing in-person communication skills, so they feel anxious, awkward, and uncomfortable when they have to put away their cell phone.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike CarrollAugust 12, 2020 at 11:16 AM

    I have noticed the cell phone being a safe place to hide for my students. If an uncomfortable situation occurs it is easy to put in some headphones or zone off into your screen. By taking the devices away I could see how students would become more empathetic because they are forced to converse and receive real reactions instead of being able to say whatever they want online with no consequences. It often challenging to make all students put away their phones, especially when most will say it is a "coping device." Have you tried anything that is effective at your school?

    ReplyDelete

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