Digitization of empathy

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to highlight the role of new technologies, pointing out how the high technologization we are experiencing allows for a twofold analysis of society: on the one hand, we note how interactions are mediated mostly by a screen; therefore, emotions undergo a necessary transformation, ranging from a mitigation of empathy to a fetishism of it. On the other hand, on the other hand, it is possible to see how the passive use of these technologies, coupled with the lack of critical analysis of them by the majority of its users, allows for a vital subsumption within an “other-world” (far from the Life-World analyzed by Husserl), yes virtual, but one that is no longer side-by-side with the real, but rather superimposed. So, a cynical and violent “world” that manifests its fullest expression, using the worst meaning of getting-in-empathy-with-another, on digital platforms that are used as work, such as Twitch and OnlyFans, within which some users are live, literally, twenty-four hours a day for the entire year, while they eat, wash or sleep, and viewers have full control of their lives, deciding what they should or should not do through donations; for example, users GSkianto or Jenna Phillips on Twich and OnlyFans, respectively. Thus, the emotional and empathic relationship is lacking, not in an absolute sense but is manifested in its worst sense, that is, one that allows the other person to “put himself in the other person’s shoes” for the sole purpose of figuring out what is the best way to hurt him. Placing these two visions side by side, therefore, might allow for a reinterpretation of what Terranova has repeatedly pointed out, namely the great dazzle of the freedom of the internet of things, which today becomes the internet of life, followed by the bitter discovery; however, it is no longer the dazzle of the freedom of the internet that is frightening, everyone is clear on this aspect, what generates a wake-up call is the passivity with which users accept this new mission of the internet-of-life and, indulging its subsumptive capacity, generate a new life of Orwellian memory, ending up more and more often in the commodification of the same.