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Social Media and the Demise of Compassion

November 25, 2009

There’s some good stuff over at the Guardian today on that age-old question: what next for social media? We note, in particular, two views from a star-studded debate at Oxford’s Said Business School:

1. Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google, believes that Facebook will replace e-mail for the next generation; and

2. Biz Stone, the CEO of Twitter, avows that the open exchange of information facilitated by social media can have a positive global impact (cf., Twitter’s role in the recent Iranian election protests).

Few people would argue with either contention, save that anyone with teenage children might insist that Facebook’s usurption of e-mail is not a future event but a present reality. But as we reflect on social media and where it’s going, some things don’t change. A glance amid the Guardian’s pages reveals that Stephen Fry almost committed ‘Twitticide’ a month ago following a barrage of vituperative online comment. He has Swordplay’s sympathy, for social media’s ability to spawn viciously ad hominem attacks remains its abiding downside.

Perhaps, though, this problem merely mirrors that in society at large, one which has prompted one artist to engage in a series of works exploring ‘the demise of compassion’. As the excellent figurative artist Nicholas Charles Williams puts it: “We’re becoming inured to news of atrocities. We tolerate TV shows which, in the name of entertainment, make fools of participants. Even high-brow presenters such as Louis Theroux use a disarming technique which results in the viewer watching subjects hang themselves.”

Williams’ subjects are often depicted in an almost hyper realist, certainly naturalistic style clutching worn and battered brown briefcases. For him they are custodians of compassion, their cases repositories of something precious and increasingly rare (and barely ever seen on online comment boards). Hence, indeed, the anxious, careful and even haunted looks on their faces.

Pictured: Williams’ studio and ‘Stored’, one of a series of works in ‘The Demise of Compassion’.