"Through these doors no strangers pass, only friends who have not yet met."
— Sign over an entrance to an Irish pub
Whenever my younger self visited Irish cousins in County Mayo's tiny Swinford, I would meet just about every local in their pub. Their tavern, with its blazing hearth, offered safe refuge from the wind, wet and often unkind world.
Here, we sank our fair share of pints. But it was more than a watering hole for tipplers. It was a social haven. Here, we talked with one another and shared news, stories, tradition, dreams and memories amid the muddied dynamics of a communal family, for family we were.
Things have changed, even though the tourist trade still markets the pub's magical lure to unwitting travelers. In their fun jaunt, "The Irish Pub," Turtle Bunbury and James Fennell mourn the slow demise of the pub and its shared life force. While factors contributing to the pub's passing include crass commercialism and catering to younger clientele more interested in clubbing, the most telling is the invasion of The Screen. Big, flat TV screens, the more and bigger the better, colonizing public space with noise and distraction.
Here's the rub. With our digital wands — TVs, smartphones, iPhones, iPads, etc. — we trick ourselves into believing that we are better connected.
But are we? Considering a crucial distinction between connectivity via digital media and interpersonal, embodied connectedness, I indelicately propose that we are more disconnected than ever. Screens beget screens. With all those consumer habitats called apps, we now inhabit screens within screens.
Recently, while visiting my aunt and uncle in Newport, R.I., a friend stopped by with her daughter and her daughter's friend, 9 and 10 years old. The girls were fixated on their smartphones, texting.
Eventually, I couldn't help but ask, "If you could choose between spending a day with your best friend or texting her, what would you pick?"
Without hesitation — "Texting!"
"Why?" I asked.
They said, "It's easier."
They're right. Texting's immediacy and illusory control is comforting. A face-to-face talk having to manage ambiguity, nuance and body language is risky. Texting can shelter us from contingency, the unanticipated ... reality.
When connectivity replaces interpersonal connectedness, we stunt our capacity for empathy. Empathy, that precognitive pairing, putting ourselves into another's place, makes us human.
Here's where face-to-face comes in. Neuroscientists are discovering seeds for empathy sprinkled throughout our brains, particularly in regions around the premotor cortex linked to bodily actions. These "mirror neurons," our own built-in motion and emotion detectors, enable us to ''feel'' another's feelings.
University of Parma neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese in his "The Roots of Empathy" claims that "This implicit, automatic, and unconscious process of embodied simulation enables the observer to use his/her own resources to penetrate the world of the other without the need of explicitly theorizing about it." Moreover, I assert that our shared "intersubjective space" languishes without embodied, person-to-person interaction. Only then, can we genuinely resonate with another.
And the resonance can be reciprocal. Think Louis Armstrong's "When you're smilin'..."
Ultimately, empathy involves crossing over our moat of self-absorption in order to be present to, for, and with the other. In today's world, here lies our biggest challenge. Though we may be hard-wired for empathy, we still need face-to-face interaction, the ground of compassion and connectedness.
Otherwise, whatever digital portals we enter, we remain strangers.
Michael Brannigan is the Pfaff Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Values at The College of Saint Rose. His email address is michael.brannigan@strose.edu.