Jadyn Sopha: Empathy Through the Screen
I was somewhat mindlessly going through the images and videos that I had been sent. I was to craft a message that I was personally struggling to feel. Suddenly a few of the photos took me back to my own time in school and I became nostalgic. It was then that the discrepancy really started to hit me.
As we approached the summer of 2021, the global pandemic was still ongoing. I had intended on going abroad, but this prospect remained iffy at best. I did not want to commit several hours of planning for something that would ultimately not happen, so I ended up doing a virtual internship. I have always wanted to go into video production, or some field with a lot of variety. I ended up doing an internship for doing content creation with the Aahwahan Foundation, an NGO in India.
I had originally intended on going to Japan or France as these were both cultures that I was interested in and knew a fair bit about. However, I think India was ultimately far more interesting because I was so unfamiliar with it. This made the culture shocks far more shocking even though they still came through the window of a screen.
During one interesting phone call, I learned how common it is to honk one’s horn while driving in India. I think I would have been let down had I done a virtual internship with a country that I was already knowledgeable about.
With a virtual internship, you’re always slightly disconnected from what you’re seeing on the screen, and it’s hard for stuff to really grab you the same way as it would in person. Due to the nature of my internship, I was often going through images and videos of the rough conditions that those in poverty in India are going through.
I saw many individuals going hungry, homeless in the cold, and entire communities being ravaged by the pandemic. Seeing these harsh conditions and unbelievable statistics was powerful, but it would be difficult for me to say that I felt genuine empathy.
I tried to understand what these people were going through, but I had never been in a situation or situations that were even remotely similar. Most of these things are so harsh and so far-removed from anything in my lived experience, that I struggled to relate. I certainly felt compassion and was sympathetic to the struggles of other people, but I had no frame of reference from which to put myself in their shoes.
I was absorbing information and synthesizing it into content for the organization’s social media, but I was rarely actually feeling anything myself. I think content of all kinds tends to be far more impactful when it has actual heart behind it, so this is something I wanted to remedy.
What actually got to me was something that I wasn’t expecting and it struck when I had really let my guard down. I was working on a project regarding the Aahwahan Foundation’s education initiatives. As I looked through photos of the classrooms in India, I noticed they were fairly similar to my classrooms when I was little.
There were desk chairs and chalkboards. I have been in school for almost eighteen years, so this was an area in which I have a lot of experience. I saw one image of an entire room of boys dabbing, this took me back to my early years of high school.
As I went through the photos of these classrooms, the most notable discrepancy was the lack of women. Even though education has been a legal right in India since 2009, many women are still expected to stay home and maintain daily chores. This isn’t something I myself have ever had to deal with, but after being drawn in by seeing sights similar to my own time in high school, I was suddenly much more cognizant of this discrepancy.
I started to genuinely feel the weight of this issue. Seeing a familiar world in a new setting caught me off-guard and got me to think about both our similarities and our differences. It was this that broke through the disconnect and made me actually feel a difference in an impactful way.
Now I have a better understanding of how to foster empathy, which is useful in all aspects of life. I think starting with how people are similar is a much stronger pathway for getting people to care about the differences that others go through. When you focus on similarities rather than differences, the discrepancies naturally become more apparent and far more powerful.
Due to the wealth of horrors we see, hear, or read about on a daily basis, many have started to put up shields that prevent messages from getting through. To some degree, this might be essential as it would be quite draining to put genuine care into everything one sees in the age of social media. But for those who are trying to get people to care, it is essential to know how to break down those shields.
When you relate something to one’s own experience, they can begin to really open up emotionally and this is when the true weight of other’s problems can really hit them.
Storytelling is a powerful tool, whether it is written, spoken, or visual. One thing I learned during this internship, is that all content is better if it can tell a story. These stories tend to work better with an emotional core, so understanding how to get through to people is an important writing tool.
Framing things in a way where you just look at how bad someone’s situation is can lead to a kind of othering that doesn’t help to put you in their shoes. I started to think about the Aahwahan Foundation’s messaging and how other organizations do it and whether or not that was really the best way.
Most people will say they care when you show them images of less fortunate people, but true empathy must come from a place of understanding.
Having a proper understanding of how to stir empathy in people is something that is useful in all aspects of life. I hope to continue making work that can make a difference and I think this is a useful thing to remember. As we move towards an increasingly digital world, more people have access to information that ever before and as a result, we are becoming increasingly desensitized. That is why understanding how to break through those barriers and really reach somebody is of paramount importance.
Jadyn Sopha is a senior Mass Communications and Media Studies major, expected to graduate Spring 2022. He did a virtual internship with content creation for the Aahwahan Foundation in India over the summer of 2021. After graduation, he plans to work in video production.