Summary Of Empathy Diaries By Sherry Sherkle

In her chapter “Empathy diaries, or the flight from conversation I don’t remember which one it is,” Sherry Turkle argues that people have become so accustomed to texting or other communication about everything that people are struggling to have a sit down conversation. She influenced my writing, and places where she showed up in this part is when I talk about having a conversation and not being able to focus on it because you are focused on your phone or distracted by something else. Sherry Turkle’s thoughts and mine intersect where I talk about conversation moving to the internet, and I think that she helped me think out about how that doesn’t always have to be a negative thing. I was pretty inspired by her thoughts on empathy and what it
When you post something on the internet especially Instagram because it is a picture platform, you are really aware of how the picture looks if it is of you, other people, some people like to edit them so they are looking the best that they can because how dare show what you really look like in real life? But if it is a photograph of you, the process could be taking a lot of photo at the location, like the beach or on a hike or something like that, then you have to edit your blemishes or whatnot out, making sure that the background looks pretty enough. Making sure that you don't have anything wrong with the picture and then you post it and wait. People are so used to instant gratification, the rush of likes that you get right after you post it and the continuing hours. But then after the couple hours and the likes stop coming in consistently, that is when you have to think “was it really worth going through all that work and now no one new is going to see it?” Very rarely, you get likes a couple weeks later because by then, there are 100 new photos and yours is way down at the bottom. I think that it makes you really hard on yourself, lowering self-esteem and confidence. But at the same time, you do it because you want to see all of the likes and you want to see all of the comments saying how cool that place looks or how pretty you are or how pretty the other people in the photo are. It then translates to you looking at other people's photographs and maybe you scroll past one for various reasons like you don't like the photo, you don't think that it is good, maybe you even think that you could take a better one and then you start comparing that person to yourself and that leads down a road that can be hurtful and harmful to many people. But then at the