An unevenly presented but beneficial report sure to spark discussion about integrating kindness into modern technology.
How empathy can be cultivated amid an increasingly distracted, indifferent world.
In her persuasive debut, journalist and editor Phillips criticizes a culture rampantly prioritizing technology over real human connections, and she questions whether the two can exist synergistically. The tech world relies on detached communication while the roots of human-to-human connection require interactive participation, concern, and amity. To some, writes the author, technology has caused a steady decline in human empathy. Phillips agrees, citing a particularly vicious interaction on social media that was upsetting yet inspired her to delve into the subject matter headfirst. She chronicles her interviews with researchers, psychologists, and tech creators and users who impart their own perspectives, and she describes the efforts of a variety of tech-initiated solutions—e.g., Faciloscope and Google’s Perspective API, real-time online comment–moderating apps that systematically filter out toxic threads. Also contributing to the cause are virtual reality games like Enter the Room, which enables players to perceive the feelings of other participants, and software geared toward creating connections with kids on the autism spectrum. Phillips provides a helpful discussion of empathy-building training for corporate employees and medical professionals. The author isn’t just a journalist with an intense interest in this modern conundrum; she’s also “a millennial in my early thirties,” so her concerns about the importance of infusing caring and compassion into tech-saturated contemporary life are particularly relevant. However, while the author’s concentration holds steady on methods to enable technology to rescue modern-day empathy, a significant question lingers throughout: Can the tech world and its gadgets and gurus reverse the hard-hearted trend it actually induced? Phillips is optimistic as she covers a host of AI–based friendship and psychotherapy alternatives, but a finer focus and tighter narrative arc would have sharpened her message of encouraging and embracing the power of empathic technology.
An unevenly presented but beneficial report sure to spark discussion about integrating kindness into modern technology.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4184-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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