Our Phones Are Making Us More Heartless

Naomi Schaefer Riley

For more than two long minutes, five teenagers watched and laughed and recorded on their phones as a disabled man drowned in a pond near his home inFloridaearlier this month. Rather than pretending they didn’t hear his pleas for help and continuing on their way, they stood to witness and tape the gruesome scene. While some may attribute this abominable lack of action to a deep-seated indifference to suffering, it was helped along by the presence of technology.

It’s been more than 50 years since the murder of Kitty Genovese in an alley near her apartment inKewGardens. The brutal killing, which lasted more than half an hour and included stabbing and rape, was reportedly seen or heard by 38 people who did nothing to help and held up as proof of the callous nature of city life. (As it turned out, those first reports were not true. Most had not known what was happening, two actually called the police and one held her until the police arrived.)

These days, however, it seems as though people are only too glad to stay idle when they witness crimes or accidents or tragedies because they are too busy filming them. A few months ago, a girl recorded an attack byChicagoteens on a man with special needs. Not only did she fail to dissuade the attackers from their actions, she turned the camera on herself, presumably wanting to be part of the show, which she was broadcasting on Facebook Live.

Shortly after that, a 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by six men in an incident that was also streamed on Facebook Live. According to the police, 40 people viewed the incident online but none of them contacted authorities. Unlike the Genovese murder, it’s pretty easy to ascertain who was watching and that they knew what was going on.

Perhaps, on some level, this is easy to understand. We watch all sorts of things on our screens each day that are staged or fake. And if you’re into watching girls getting raped, there is a multibillion-dollar porn industry ready to cater to your needs. If people have lost track of the difference between fantasy and reality, we can’t be surprised.

But what about the people who are doing the recording – who, instead of calling the police (let alone trying to help), just pull out their phones? These are the people who think they are living in a kind of personal reality show. Filming what’s happening gives bystanders a role in the action. Otherwise, they’d just be watching a car wreck or a fight or a drowning while twiddling their thumbs or chatting with friends. And that would just seem weird.

Our phones make us part of the action, but they also provide us with a useful distance from other people. In 2013, Comedian Louis CK told Conan O’Brien about the problems with giving kids smartphones. “I think these things are toxic, especially for kids. They don’t look at people when they talk to them, and they don’t build empathy.” Louis CK continued: “You know, kids are mean, and it’s because they’re trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, ‘you’re fat,’ and then they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, ‘oh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that.’ But when they write ‘you’re fat,’ then they just go, ‘Mmm, that was fun, I like that.’ ”

It’s not just that texting messages is easier than insulting someone to their face. Putting a screen between you and another person makes it seem as though you are not really watching them – but watching them on TV. The person in front of you is no longer a live human being experiencing pain or suffering but a character on a show. You can change the background behind them, the color of their face and clothes. You can add and remove things from the picture.

We have long debated the extent to which watching violent television can affect the way kids and adults understand violence in the real world. A recent study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, for instance, showed that the more times adults viewed movie clips with violent content, the lower the age they thought children should be able to watch them. The desensitization effect is dramatic, according to the researchers.

Violence on the screen has become more worrisome, as it has become more realistic with first-person shooter games and virtual reality headsets. But what if we are also using screens to make real violence seem more like the fictional kind?

The teens who watched the man drowning will likely be charged with a misdemeanor for not reporting a death. To them, though, maybe they weren’t watching a drowning man, just a guy who plays one on TV.