“...a moral pretext for what is really just imaginative pleasure.”

July 17, 2018 8:40 AM

Empathy Machines: Fellow feeling as a technologically mediated experience by Olivia Rosane “The narrative about the power of literature, like the current approach to VR, makes historical change not a matter of the resistance efforts of the oppressed and their allies but of relatively privileged people speaking to other relatively privileged people to spark a paternalistic response. [...] By focusing on bringing the experiences of the marginalized to elites, VR developers implicitly endorse a system in which a small number of people retain outsize power.”
posted by Fizz (4 comments total)

While I have some minor quibbles, I want to lead with

What emerges from this is that appeals to empathy are politically useless unless scaffolded by an accurate understanding of power.

Yes! The most frustrating conversations I have are those who seem to have a completely inverted notion of who holds power in a given situation. An incorrect understanding of power just wrecks your ability to draw correct inferences about social problems.

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Ok, on with the quibbles and qualifications.

UNICEF found that showing Clouds Over Sidra halved the number of conversations face-to-face fundraisers needed to have before someone agreed to donate. And when Project Empathy’s first film was shown at the Democratic National Convention, 85 percent of viewers said it changed their minds about criminal justice. That seems promising, but both projects also share a theory of social change that is surprisingly anti-social, despite its emphasis on human connection. By focusing on bringing the experiences of the marginalized to elites, VR developers implicitly endorse a system in which a small number of people retain outsize power.

There is an overarching sense in which this is valid, but... Elites currently exist, and so long as they exist, we want them to have a more empathic understanding of the people around them. The act of creating and exhibiting a VR experience doesn't itself prop up the elites or exacerbate inequality. Those VR exhibits are not a complete solution to any problem, but they are an incremental contribution, especially if it's particularly effective at e.g. changing people's minds about criminal justice.

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No matter how much I, a white woman, could imagine what Cheung Inhin might feel in these instances, and no matter how long I walked in her shoes, other people would never perceive us in the same way. I could imagine her pain, but I would never actually suffer it, and that made the experience of walking in her shoes feel more like consumption than communication.

Interestingly, psychologists have studied the effects of different depths of empathy. Empathy that is too acute can emotionally overload the helper and make them less effective at helping. So the fact that VR has some limitations in transmitting the life experience of another doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to reduce the total effectiveness of helping; you've got to find the right point on the curve.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:28 AM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

FFS, this is straight out of Blade Runner.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:32 AM on July 17, 2018

But why would the author object to some vs none empathy? All the author is saying is that elites communicating with each other does not create empathic discourse, and in parallel decentered discourse as opposed to recentered discourse is not empathic either. Those critiques of media and literature seem reasonable.
posted by polymodus at 12:01 PM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Robert Yang’s "If you walk in someone else's shoes, then you've taken their shoes": empathy machines as appropriation machines
posted by juv3nal at 12:54 PM on July 17, 2018 [4 favorites]