Empathy reversal: from maintaining tribal unity to virtue signaling
A medium allows as much empathy through as needed for communication. Social media users not only consume empathic involvement—they produce it, leading to the overproduction of empathy. Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
In orality, empathic engagement with others fulfills two tasks: 1) Coordination-synchronization: to keep the collective together, oral communication must be intrusive and persuasive. 2) Memorization: empathic involvement provides individual imprinting of collective memory.
When the only medium for coordination and memorization is other people, the only way to succeed is by triggering their response, achieving rapport, and inciting their contribution to collective coherence. Most of the effort in oral speech is spent on tuning people in.
Writing detached the message from the speaker’s performance, making empathic involvement less relevant. A medium allows as much empathy through as needed for communication. In mediated interaction, the level of empathic involvement depends on the medium’s ability to convey it.
It’s easy to notice—if you know where to look. The emotional impact of messages differs when conveyed through oral speech, reading, photos, or television. By their very design, media determine the level of empathy in society; they also determine the distance empathy can reach.
Writing requires linear and sequential organization of content. The need to sift content through the writer’s organizing effort imparts a certain degree of rationality. This is why text always favors rationality over emotionality, unlike oral speech.
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Radio and TV reversed literacy’s emotional deficiency. Notably, McLuhan introduced the term “empathic involvement” not for oral speech but to describe the psychological effect of retribalization in the Global Village—in a world united and agitated by electronic media.
Unlike reading, television engages viewers emotionally rather than rationally. TV immerses viewers in a situation through watching and listening, similar to the environmental immersion typical of orality.
It was no coincidence that the Vietnam War ended after the proliferation of television. Vivid images of atrocities fueled the anti-war movement. This did not happen during the somewhat similar Korean War a decade earlier—TV wasn’t there yet.
The level of empathy sustained by the medium with “live” pictures has made the mass slaughter of armies and civilians unacceptable. Instead, the era of “hybrid wars” began. Because of media, wars now try to disguise themselves as anti-terrorist or military “operations.”
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Television immersed people in a mode of perception where they had to sympathize, admire, be angered, be frustrated, and experience the full spectrum of emotions. The same mode of perception characterized tribal orality—hence McLuhan’s retribalization.
In tribal settings, however, empathic involvement served as a mechanism of survival. People had to be emotionally tuned in to ensure better collective interactions and memorization of tribal knowledge. Rapport was the foundation of cohesion and tribal unity.
Today there is no survival need for people to physically synchronize their collective perception while watching TV. Television retrieved the empathic involvement of orality in viewers just technically, simply due to its capacity for emotional immersion.
The TV-era compassion was hollow. It was just an effect of the TV drama of news or fiction, brought into each home. As usual, the medium imposed a social pattern. With electronic media, empathic involvement 1) lost its survival role, 2) became a commodity, 3) turned performative.
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Digital media caused new reversals in the structure of empathic involvement. Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of the newsfeed was to prioritize users’ personal news. But by subjecting public concerns to personal relevance, the newsfeed made public concerns overly personal.
People learned to experience distant news not through detached text or generalized TV drama, but within their most intimate spaces—screens on personal devices. Public dramas entered inner circuits. Digital media made society even more empathetic than electronic media did.
TV emotionally immersed people in news through watching and listening; social media added talking. Empathic involvement reversed into empathic engagement. Social media users not only consume empathic involvement—they produce it, leading to the overproduction of empathy.
The affective economy of TV was based on the formula “money—affect—more money”; social media upgraded the formula to “money—engagement—more money.” The commodification of empathic engagement created a feedback loop, forcing social media to extract even more empathy.
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The active mode—empathic engagement—conditioned people not only to react empathetically to each other but also to expect an empathetic reaction from others. Any activity on social media is a request for affirmation, submitted to others.
From something socially approved, empathy reversed into something socially demanded. This ethical reversal created conditions for a massive ideological shift toward collectivist ideologies during the Axial Decade—even in inherently individualistic societies.
On social media, the explosion of socialization reversed into the implosion of passive (or not-so-passive) aggression. People want their emotional investment recognized. They also expect others to align—an instinct of the tribal mind.
As with many things on social media, expressing empathy is highly socially contagious. When everyone in your feed voices the “popular” concerns of the day, you must join in to fit in. The Viral Inquisitor is watching you. Empathy oversupply has reversed into empathy “overdemand.”
Demanding from each other more empathy for personally dear values, people get anxious when responses fall short. In an agitated environment, demands for empathy easily reverse into ultimatums of ideological allegiance and empathy policing, leading to mass anger and polarization.
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The commodification of affect (by TV) and engagement (by social media) created empathy without unity. Digital tribes are virtual—formed not by the vital need for tribal unity, but by the design of media hardware. Users engage emotionally without real personal connection.
Empathy without unity amplifies animosity. People attack one another with their requests for affirmation, causing an empathy race in which empathy is inevitably weaponized.
The oversupply of empathy recodes moral, aesthetic, and political values, flips role models for good and bad guys in mass culture, reverses policies from targeting the broad population to isolating minorities, devalues merit in favor of identity, and rewrites history.
The empathy overload strengthened the reversal of identity into credentials. The constant demand for empathy made the “high moral ground” a business asset, fueling moral entrepreneurship. Once rooted in religion, it now thrives on the media-driven overproduction of empathy.
The oversupply of empathy also leads to “toxic empathy,” or what psychologist Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy”—excessive compassion that undermines societal cohesion, erodes trust, distorts policies, and reverses into rising crime and terrorism.
Baudrillard noted in 1981: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Social media echoed: we live in a world where there is more and more empathic involvement and less and less real empathy. Oversupply devalued it.
Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
The Digital Reversal explores today’s turmoil through McLuhan’s concept of reversals: any technology reverses its effects when reaching extremes or limits (as with cars: too many of them reverse mobility into traffic jams). Humankind is now approaching such extremes, with more social interactions reaching ultimate speed thanks to digital connection. This creates conditions for reversals of everything. The entire book is written in tweets—1295 of them—which makes it the first “tweetise” in history, a reversal of treatise.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
