Inciting empathy?

Reflection on Kriplean, T., Toomim, M., Morgan, J., Borning, A., & Ko, A. (2012, May). Is this what you meant?: promoting listening on the web with reflect. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1559-1568). ACM.

Summary:

The paper presents a tool called Reflect to promote active listening. The paper argues that there has been a decline in active listening and attention on the web. Reflect is a tool which encourages people to summarize posts and engage deeper with others’ thoughts. The paper further posits that Reflect helps in active listening. It also presents a design framework to promote deeper discussions on the web through active listening, and provides evidence of it through deployments in three different settings.

Reflections:

I love the paper and the motivation. I agree with the authors that there is growing anger, polarization, and resentment on the web where we are no longer able to have meaningful discussions and healthily engage with differing values.

I also agree that we do not actively listen but I feel that it is not limited to online platforms. I feel we do not truly listen in real-life too. I certainly do not! I feel a part of the problem both online and offline is the difficulty in empathizing with others, especially with those with differing views. Empathy is a complex human value and it is hard to encourage empathy and compassion especially mediated through technology.

Diving a little further, I feel the willingness to be vulnerable is key in developing empathy. However, we are becoming more guarded, afraid of appearing to be vulnerable and ready to pounce on the we-versus-them fight. Part of this has to do with our media consumption habits that profit from engagement and thus have been feeding us polarizing content to keep us glued. Part of it also has to do with a general distrust in socio-technical systems.

Thinking of the latter part leads me to think about extending Reflect. What if we add a feature that lets people mark with tokens or banners when they feel that a particular argument helped them change their mind? What if we promote such marking of having changed one’s perspective by making it an accepted value. In fact, an appreciated value? This is following a principle listed in the paper: “Listening interfaces help establish an empathetic normative environment”. Having said that, it is unclear how we could design to promote such value aroudn a web application.