Why people suck
The study of mirror neurons is still developing, but it is beginning to shed light on motor and language development, and also empathy. We may cry at the sight of a sad friend, screw up our face when we see someone react to a bad smell, or cringe when we see someone punched, because we are mirroring what she is experiencing. Research by the French-German neuroscientist Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen Social Brain Lab and others has shown that people who identify themselves as empathic on self-questionnaires have stronger mirror neuron activity.
The ramifications this research presents for communicating over e-mail are enormous. The visual absence of the person we are in exchange with deprives us of a deep-seated, physical identification with the actions and emotions of others. Marco Iacoboni, the author of Mirroring People, says the effects of this are writ large on the Internet: "The rudeness and aggressiveness over the Internet -- e-mail, blogs, Web forums, etc. -- is likely due to the fact that people cannot look into each other's faces and cannot activate mirror neurons, thus cannot activate a very basic process of empathy for other human fellows."
From The Tyranny of E-mail : the Four-Thousand-Year Journey to your Inbox, by John Freeman.
The ramifications this research presents for communicating over e-mail are enormous. The visual absence of the person we are in exchange with deprives us of a deep-seated, physical identification with the actions and emotions of others. Marco Iacoboni, the author of Mirroring People, says the effects of this are writ large on the Internet: "The rudeness and aggressiveness over the Internet -- e-mail, blogs, Web forums, etc. -- is likely due to the fact that people cannot look into each other's faces and cannot activate mirror neurons, thus cannot activate a very basic process of empathy for other human fellows."
From The Tyranny of E-mail : the Four-Thousand-Year Journey to your Inbox, by John Freeman.