"Live Well, and Live Broadly": The Emotional Dimension of Technology
Additionally, Jon Ronson addresses the use of technology to publicly shame in his TEDTalk and book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Both the book and the TEDTalk explore how social media has influenced the lives of people in particularly negative ways, and the way that technology allows us to publicly humiliate people whose actions the mass determine as unacceptable. The emotional impacts of being publicly shamed as indescribable, as Jon Ronson explains in his TEDTalk. The Internet has incredible power. And all power has the ability to be abused and misused. When we don't realize or aren't taught about the power of technology and how influential it can be, these tools become even more powerful. The power of the Internet can be used for helping, building bridges, and making connections, instead of being used for shaming, hurting, and bullying. We can help to build a society that uses technology for the former.
Thus, our job is twofold: first, we must teach the power of words, technology, and the real world impacts of what happens online. Ronson discusses both how and why people are shamed through social media. If we teach students the power of words and the impacts their words can have on others, then they can begin to see the emotions and feelings of others.
Second, we must teach empathy, and, as discussed earlier, how to think about the emotional impacts of our actions online as well as in real life. This notion of teaching empathy also goes back to the idea of explicitly teaching how to build and sustain healthy relationships with other people, at the heart of which is communication.
The best time to do both of these things, as according ot BLANK, is in early education. The sooner that students can be taught about empathy, the better. However, it is also never too late to teach people to consider others when posting online.
