Technology PAVING THE ROADWAYS OF empathy

from 603 Diversity, Issue 6 (Spring 2023)

by Yankee Publishing - New Hampshire Group

Fisto Ndayishimiye COMMUNITY ORGANIZER

Ihave spent a great deal of my career thinking about two fundamental issues: technology and story. And I’m intrigued to see these two issues dovetail so elegantly in this issue of 603 Diversity.

I’m approaching my mid-50s, so when I was a kid, home computers were just hitting the market. We didn’t have one in the house until I won one – coincidentally as part of one of my first newspaper jobs as a paper carrier. I was about 11, and at the time, I wanted nothing more passionately than to be a writer; to create the stories and books that constituted so much of the world I lived in at the time. That world of literature was a comforting distance from day-to-day life, especially as an awkward, introverted pre-adolescent having a hard time figuring out where he was supposed to fit into the real world.

When I got that computer, a new passion collided with the desire to make stories: I discovered I loved to solve the puzzles entailed in writing code. And it was all new enough at the time so there was nobody to tell you that was something you did as a job and not for fun, or that you were supposed to have someone teach it to you rather than self-instruct. There were no gatekeepers. So I wrote code, and I continued to write stories. One day, many years down the road, I was a young newspaper editor who’d made his newspaper’s first website. I’d discovered that nexus where storytelling and technology met and this had become my career.

For many years I ran digital operations for media companies, trying to help them figure out how to adapt storytelling to a new technological landscape. It’s stunning to consider the impact things like the Internet, and later the smartphone, had on how stories were curated, promoted, presented and consumed.

But throughout all of that change, I don’t believe the fundamental power of a story to connect with a human heart changed. And I believe the technology, like it has throughout history, after disrupting things for a while, went on to make it even easier to convey stories, to spread them around the world, like positive viruses. Empathy viruses. Which brings me back to our issue this week. Our cover story is about two people from diverse backgrounds in conversation; sometimes difficult, uncomfortable conversation. And it’s also about the technology that is facilitating that conversation: podcasts.

I’m a big fan of podcasts. I listen to them while I run, drive, do dishes, while I shovel snow and clean the house. Like novels and long-form magazine stories (couldn’t resist), they are an antidote to the sound-bite news brief or the half-read headline you scroll past on social media – both designed, sometimes intentionally, to create outrage. Because outrage creates engagement. But it never creates empathy.

Discussions such as the ones in the “The Conversations We Should Be Having,” podcast hosted by Tanisha Johnson and Elliott Moya, do create empathy. Just as great stories do. Because they give you time to live inside them. To really feel them. And importantly, to experience and sit with the difficult feelings that arise when we really struggle to understand a consciousness, an experience, outside of our own. This is not easy work.

As Johnson says, “We have to show how we can disagree, and get mad but not walk away from the conversation. We have to sit with our discomfort and talk about it so we can move to what comes next.”

Contributing Writers

Connie Cherise

Ben Bacote

Wildolfo Arvelo

James McKim