Does arguing online make you less empathetic?

What you're experiencing is nothing new. The internet is not to blame. It's been the human experience 100 years ago, and since the dawn of man. I recently discovered an excellent book written by a guy called Dale Carnegie in the '30s. It's called, How to Win Friends and Influence People. When I read in the free Amazon preview/sample that arguing with people never gets anywhere--only ever makes the other person get defensive and dig in rather than listen--that struck me as one of the truest things I'd ever read but never really thought about before. I knew then I had to read the full thing.


Personally, I've always spoken to my family honestly, whether I like something or dislike something, I'm never going to cushion what I have to say for sake of feelings, but I can be comfortable doing that because I know we love each other, and that love transcends anything. Most times, it is easy to have minor disagreements without it ever even becoming a fight. In real life, when I communicate with people I know and care about, I just naturally tend to phrase things in a way that gets my view across while still being open and sympathetic to what they feel. A critical difference between online and real life is that I also actually do care what my family have to say and how they feel. It's just naturally impossible to extend the same love to everybody in existence. Love, by definition, has to be a special, exclusive emotion reserved for those you truly care about. If it were possible to love everyone equally, the word itself would be meaningless. Of course, one should still extend common courtesy in discourse with strangers, but I think that is the main difference. When you're amongst friends and family, you do genuinely care about them and their feelings and their beliefs. When you're amongst strangers, you don't. Which is why generally one does not get into serious discussions with total strangers in real life. We usually only engage in small talk. 


The internet creates a forum where people can go beyond small talk and discuss more serious topics, but the problem is we inherently don't really care about the other side, because we don't know them personally and aren't invested in them through repeated interaction. There's no human face, just a wall of text. There's no non-verbal cues or "vibes" you get off someone in person. Enunciation and emotion in the voice itself matters. You aren't even communicating in real time, bouncing things off one another. It's one post in isolation, then somebody else responds later, and so on. There's so much nuance lost in translation that makes online communication so much more apt to misunderstanding and frustration.

What is novel to the internet, in my opinion, is the kneejerk reaction culture, and that has extended to other things like news outlets. It's a culture of immediately forming rant-like opinions based on clickbaity headlines alone before the person has even bothered to actually read the contents of the article. To quickly jump to conclusions without giving the benefit of the doubt. To re-share dubious propaganda without fact-checking first. Some of that mentality is justified--after all, not everybody's words online are really worth your time to read or closely examine. A lot of it, most of it even, is just ranting, meandering garbage.

But the unfortunate result is that most people's default setting is to completely ignore anything more than a sentence long. I think that's one reason why most articles and websites nowadays seem to make text font bigger and margins narrower, to fit as few words on screen as possible, even if it makes actually reading a pain. They're afraid too much text on screen might scare away readers.