Digital Empathy Quotes

You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it's a very dehumanizing thing,It's almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing ... My hope is, as we get out of it, we'll reach the next level of conscience.

My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.

People can travel great distances on a computer, so why can't we travel that way emotionally?

Twitter helped others to see me as a human being. And showed me their humanity, too.

Online we have a compassion deficit

Nowadays with the internet, it's an equal opportunity brutal playing field. I mean, everyone is brutal to everybody half the time. People can be unbelievably brutal on the internet, about everything. But they can also be really, really nice. The problem is that human beings like to focus on the negative sometimes, unfortunately.

Facebook's a wonderful, incredible way to bring humanity together. They've brought together 2 billion people in the largest fictional family in history. So young people are starting to empathize with each other through Facebook across the globe. This is wonderful. However, when everyone needs Facebook because it's so successful that everyone's on it, then it starts to look like a global public utility, a public good. Same with Amazon.

Zen Hugs - the hugs that you would get, if we were there, if we could hug you, but we aren't, and we can't.

The Internet is a very intimate entertainment experience. I'm in my own apartment talking to people, and I want them to feel like they're with me in my apartment. So if I'm listening to them and taking ideas from them and being honest with how I'm feeling, it resonates even more that we're having a real, actual conversation.

There's plenty of rude stuff online. People say things online that they would be ashamed to say face to face. If people could treat others as though they were speaking face to face, that would be huge.

Because the Internet is a medium, it doesn't care whether it transmits love or hate. It is what we build and who we are that make it what it is. We can build things that diminish our humanity or build things that bring us to human flourishing.

I think having not only personal connections with friends and family I'm able to pull from, but having a connection with so many people through social media, it also feels like I have a relationship with those people that follow me. And feel that what I'm going through, they've gone through something similar, and that's why we've connected. And they're the ones that make it into that body of work that represents them or that time in their life, because we've found each other.