I wanted to research more into empathy as I believe it could be a key cause for the increased hatred and division in society. We can see this clearly on social media and being stuck in our echo chambers. I wanted to explore both sides and learn more about them. The anti immigration users are using hatred words to spread the idealogy that the UK should closee the borders and shouldn’t let refugees in to the country as they believe they are a damage to the economy and society. The idea that they are a damage stems from the thought of the receive loads of money whereas the other groups in society such as veterans are homeless. It’s like if you help them then you can’t also help the other group which is a common idea, I could see this in my own culture as well in Turkey there are a lot of societal divisions and daily I can see it on social media. Political divisions allows people to loose their empathy to the other group, it creates them as the enemy as they don’t agree with the thoughts and beliefs. I thought the brief is asking me to increase social collectiveness and bring people together using social media. I could create this by increasing empathy, if people stop seeing the other side as the enemy or the ‘others’ ‘terrorists’ it could improve their connection. In one of the articles, I found a project called “Humans of New York” Humans of New York began as a photography project in 2010. The initial goal was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers on the street, and create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants.” The project focused on public and sharing there stories and enhancing the diversity of the city how we all live together. The project was so big that it expanded to other countries such as Iran, Kenya , Ukraine, Mexico and more. The series has photographs and small paragraph of their either their life story or something that they want to share.
I decided to create a project that focused on increasing peoples empathy by sharing stories of immigrants but also allowing the anti immigrant users to understand and realise how hurtful their comments, tweets can be. The next step is to decide how I will create this whether an app, or social media campaign etc.
“One can reduce empathy, but one can also promote it, learning positive associations with another group,”
References:
https://www.livescience.com/51392-will-tech-bring-humanity-together-or-tear-it-apart.html
https://www.livescience.com/8299-feel-pain-race.html
https://www.humansofnewyork.com/countries
https://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/127410037831/its-taken-a-lot-of-time-to-fit-together-like
Busra Yildiz 