Digital Empathy
Digital empathy is my effort to combine emotional, cognitive, and social skills into a media literacy curriculum. This emerging construct is informed by three theoretical lenses. These include empathy phenomena (Batson, 2009), which helps frame a definition of empathy as an ability and process; social information processing theory [SIP] (Walther, 1992) which outlines the differences between face-to-face (FtF) and computer mediated communication (CMC), and new literacies (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, 2013), which highlight how new reading and writing skills impact learning in a digital age. Together, these three lenses showcase how empathy is an integral component of emotional and cognitive development in both offline and online spaces.
Freud's (2005[1911]) topographical model inspired me to perceive empathy as an iceberg with three layers (see figure 1). Using the iceberg metaphor can help us conceptualize the different empathy terms and their relationships with self-regulation learning and executive functioning. Cognitive and affective empathy are the personality characteristics under the water where no one can see or measure how big and deep they are. The mediated level, that some of it is above and some under water is the process of self-regulation learning, which monitor and delegate empathy toward the final level of observed behaviors, the executive functioning.
In the last fifteen years, as I moved from my filmmaking practice into media literacy education, I have taught video production with various groups of students as part of media literacy curricula. Although I have modified my curriculum and practice along the way, the process of production and my general ways of teaching have remained the same. Reading Batson’s eight phenomena made me realize that each stage of the video production process refers to a different phenomenon of empathy. The rigid process of production fosters empathy by its specific sequence where every stage builds on the previous one. It is almost as if, once a stage is finished and the other starts, the students practice one empathic phenomenon and are ready to practice it while acquiring a new one. By the end of the process at the screening event, most of the students have higher levels of empathy due to their social interactions via the digital tools. Table 1 illustrates the overlaps between video production and the various empathic phenomena including the executive functioning.