The readers that know me on Facebook are aware that a few weeks ago, I had to have my dog put down. Two days before Christmas to be precise. So, y’know, best Christmas ever! In hindsight, what I found most interesting about the whole affair is thing is the way that other people, when confronted with that sort of thing in their averagely happy daily lives, a) just don’t know how to deal with it; and b) really show how well they don’t know you.

I’m going to try to keep this away from being all about me. There’s LiveJournal for that bullshit. But there is some context that needs to be explained, because otherwise this seems like an angry, bitter rant… which I guess it kind of is, even if it isn’t intended to be.

Allow me to explain. That’s my dog, Particle Accelerator (Or Accel for short), there in the video…The video was taken very shortly after I got him, and this was his response to watching me and a friend practice Kendo, Japanese sword fighting, in the backyard. He picked up a stick and started hitting my friend. The idea of a dog that’s also a Kendo master is not only hilarious, but also establishes a pattern of him attempting to emulate human behaviour. In his life, he also learnt that “sit” meant to find the nearest chair, attempted to get into Tshirts (to get stuck on a semi-regular basis), and tried to eat tooth brushes where possible because why else would they go into the mouth every morning so they were clearly food.

Accel had to be put down on December 23rd because he’d basically become one large mass of tumors. Personally, the worst part was that even though he was clearly in pain, he was still happy, and was wagging his tail as an IV syringe full of phenobarbital was inserted into his wrist because so many people were paying attention to him, patting him, hugging him. Too trusting by half. The syringe was depressed a little, and he literally went to sleep. Considering his tail was wagging until the last moment one can assume that this was a good death.

The kind of death that should be legalised for people, but that’s another rant.

Now my response to this was somewhat short and bitter, and naturally friends attempted to console me. Except that’s not what I wanted. I don’t really deal well with sympathy, especially from people that never really new the deceased. It’s probably something to do with Jewish funerals and relatives that were never there expressing grief, inferiority complexes, schadenfreude-ish ghouls, or some other “There’s a word for that in German!” bullshit. Either way, I was deleting posts from people that were basically along the lines of “sorry”. They didn’t do anything, so they can’t be sorry for something, and I dislike people feeling sorry for me.

So I posted the second line you see in that picture.

And this leads us back to my points:

People don’t know how to deal with other people’s grief in a social networking environment.

And it also goes to show how well they know the person expressing that grief. Or whether they’ve even read the godamn comments. Even after explaining that I didn’t want it and that I just needed people to be aware of why I was being a bitch that day, expressions of sympathy kept coming… and I kept deleting them.

The ones that got closest to the mark of what I needed to hear (read) were people saying they were happy I got to say goodbye properly, or sharing stories of how their pets had died. There were four of these. Roughly a tenth of the posted comments (not including private messages, SMSs, phone calls, or emails). To be honest, cynic that I am, I’ve always suspected that social networks reduce functional empathy… And it seems that academic studies back me up on this: Continuous Partial Empathy? – Empathy Dropped 40% in a Decade. When you’re caring so much for so many people it can’t help by tend to get diluted. How sincere can it really be for a person that you see less than twice a year? Or have never actually met in a physically present space?

Let’s face it, online it’s hard to convey genuine emotion because we’re reduced to text. It’s why emoticons were invented. How many times has a sarcastic comment sailed over your head because you read it in good faith? Or has someone come across sounding like an arsehole because you read their message whilst in a bad mood yourself? Being continually connected to people online, where we can’t truly read into what they’re saying, is making it harder for us to react appropriately in the way that most benefits that person in a social interactivity based context.

And this is where it gets truly pathetic:

As people are becoming effectively more and more clueless as to how to respond based on people’s emotionless text, a problem exacerbated by the language barriers inherent in generation gaps and divergent spelling such as SMSese, companies are looking for ways to capitalise on social retards solve these problems for us.

It’s still in the concept phase, but RIM, makers of the Blackberry, have created a phone they actually call Empathy. It comes with a magical biometric mood ring. Seriously. It takes the kind of readings you’d expect from a polygraph test to test your emotional state, then display a colour on the face of a ring (just like a real 1970s mood ring!)… and then it adds that data to your post so people know how you’re feeling and can respond appropriately.

This is where the problem lies.

People should already know how to respond appropriately for someone that is supposedly a friend!

It’s led to what I would like to term “Drive-by Empathy”. People caring, emoting, empathising for about 8 seconds, and then moving on to the next thing where they don’t particularly need to care anymore.  I admit that I am as guilty of this as anyone. It basically affects anyone with an expanded social circle where a lot of things get shared. Where extreme emotion, be it happiness, sadness, sheer grief or terror is experienced and expressed in a public, people seek to be a part of the communal experience. We are pack animals / tribal by nature, and we seek to provide succor and relief to other members of the pack / tribe. Except that telepresence, without video at any rate, eliminates the ability to actually empathise as you’re not there – you’re just not experiencing what they are. Attempting to be part of something that you’re not actually a party to only serves to degrade the experience for the people at the center of it, and often in a way that is intrusive.

The analogy I keep coming back to is that of bandwidth.

By being connected to so many, we degrade the amount we can give to each every time some kind of transfer is required.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go steal my neighbour’s wireless emotions… I’m too cheap to have any of my own.

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1 Comment »

1. 

   lol thats an awesome video. <3 makes me remember why i wanted to steal him soo badly. if only the snoring cuddly beast would fit up my jumper.

   Comment by Carrots — January 3, 2011 @ 3:40 pm

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