Or at least that is what several psychologists in the business of criticizing the media have to say. I'm not the first to point out that there are problems with the 24-hour news cycle, but an honest assessment would be lacking if it didn't point out that we suffer from information overload. We are bombarded with so many snippets of information — be it from MSNBC/FOX/CNN, the Internet, the uber-hectic New York Times front page or even flyers on the library steps at Tufts — that we don't have time to invest ourselves in any one story and end up not caring about any of them. In truth, this doesn't seem so bad: Why be bogged down with countless vote counts in the Senate, and what does Balloon Boy have to do with me?
News conduits cover things that go beyond the minutiae and address gravely serious matters: things like genocide, mass starvation, high death tolls from natural disasters and government corruption. Faced with such a mass of issues, it's easy to list these items with a certain nonchalance. Perhaps more disturbing than these realities is just how little we seem to care about them.
A name has been given to this phenomenon of being able to recount such devastating realities without feeling an ounce of pity: empathy fatigue. Psychologists suggest that just as humans innately show an interest in helping people, we also possess an incredibly ability to simply withdraw. While growing up of course, we felt the collective knots in our stomachs the first time we realized that millions of people die because there aren't enough crops, or that sometimes governments massacre political dissent. Yet as these events moved beyond single, disturbing incidences to repetitive realities, we became overloaded. Our limited capacity to feel has been proven by researchers at the University of Oregon. We are bombarded with so many images of things we know to be horrible that rather than engage with the stories, we ignore them and distance ourselves. The grand irony, of course, is that while news stations and aid organizations try to do good by informing us of all these things, the end result is that they seem to desensitize us even more.
The good news is that just as we understand the factors that push us away from feeling for major issues affecting international development, we also have the knowledge of what can pull us back into feeling for these causes — and make it a priority to address them. Back in 2007, Nicholas Kristof wrote an article called "Save the Darfur Puppy," in which he notes the ability of an ever-so-cute puppy in a study of Americans to evoke considerable emotion while reports of Sudanese genocide did not do nearly as good of a job soliciting emotion and the policy implications of this response (a highly recommended reading). Coupled with another article in the Huffington Post by Jamil Zaki, we are able to synthesize how to reconnect with the feelings we ought to have about these issues. The key, it seems, is that news programs tell us not just about the masses but of individuals who have emotional lives, as rich and complex as viewers. We best internalize experiences when we can see them as part of a network of problems. It becomes less about the numbers and more about people — people you believe to be suffering in a way you might suffer yourself. You find yourself caring, even amidst the deluge of things to care about. And I think we need more of that.
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Jacob Kreimer is a junior majoring in International Relations. He can be reached at Jacob.Kreimer@tufts.edu.
