Problems with text based Communication
It is possible that messages will be misread or misunderstood because text messaging cannot accurately represent tone, emotion, facial expressions, gestures, body language, eye contact, spoken speaking, or face-to-face discussion. Through the media, the true meaning of your message is lost.
Respectful Communication Online
For most of us, relationships made online have completely changed how we live our lives and created a world of incredible opportunities. We are all digital citizens, regardless of who we are or where we are, and what we do can have a significant impact on others.
It can feel that being negative online is a fairly typical occurrence when insults can be tossed in any comments section and sub tweeting someone seems to be the only method to get things off your chest. The problem is that many individuals are unaware that the hostility they engage in online may truly be classified as cyberbullying and that it can escalate quickly.
Understanding Motivations to Online Empathy
The internet allows for the rapid flow of information while also allowing users to express their emotions, ideas, and opinions. Before the internet, empathy was mostly limited to the community level. However, with today’s globally connected world and humans' finite capacity for empathy, overload in the sense of perception, cognition, and emotion can result in desensitization or dissociation, where there is awareness of others but no emotional participation.
The paradox of empathy is that it can be used as a tool for manipulation and control, in which case it is just a mimicry of empathy. It can promote better relationships, understanding, and acquaintance with different people and cultures, while, on the other hand, it can foster unhealthy interactions like impersonation, false communication, and ultimately online abuse. Therefore, the ability to interact with others that the Internet provides is less significant than the unique attitude that each person has toward it and others they contact with through the network. Internet is not inherently empathic, but it can aid in the expansion of one's fundamental empathy, which is formed via intense interpersonal interactions in the actual world, to the distant and sensory unobservable others.
Biases
If left unchecked, prejudices lead people to limit and skew the information they take in, comprehend, and think about. Unchecked biases therefore prohibit people from fully comprehending another person's ideas and feelings, which is the basic foundation of empathy.
We cannot attempt to control our biases if we are not aware of them. And even once we become or are conscious of them, we must have the drive to try to control them. The desire to be fair might be an internal or external motivator for that motivation. It has been shown that fairness results from empathy. Bias, which is described as "an unfair personal opinion that influences your judgment," is an issue. To moderate one's biases in the absence of external drive, a person must have internal motivation, which calls for empathy. In the meantime, uncorrected biases lead people to restrict and distort the information they take in, comprehend, and think about. The ability to think clearly will be hampered by how constrained and skewed the information heard, understood, and considered is.