Journalist and conversational expert Celeste Headlee has some ideas. In 2017 she published a whole book about fixing conversations, called We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. When I called her to discuss it, she wanted to make one thing clear up front: “We are about to get a whole bunch of books and think pieces that blame tech

This reaction tends to be less common with tragedies that affect larger groups of people, a phenomenon sometimes called the “collapse of compassion.” Experts think this happens because we automatically regulate our emotional reactions when we expect them to be overwhelming.

Social technology is ostensibly about connecting people, but it doesn’t often foster the empathy that’s needed for real human connection.

Another friend, a woman, scolded me for not defending her husband in a debate about the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. You have a lot of learning to do, she said to me, before blocking me and never speaking to me again.

cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings).

Franchesca Ramsey, an activist and actress who gained fame from a series of viral YouTube videos, writes about this poignantly in her book Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist.

Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself.

For those of us who have lived much of our lives online, giving up on the possibility of empathic connection via technology doesn’t feel like a real option.

When I hear about a new app, gadget, or tech-based service, I try to ask myself the following questions: How might this improve my life or experience, or those of others? What is the potential for it to be manipulated, and are there safeguards? Is there incentive for the people in charge to monitor this—do they have skin in the game? And