More Empathy Online

Empathy: In face-to-face interactions, communication has a multi-modal nature involving the processing of visual facial cues (such as the speaker’s facial expression), the tone of the voice (i.e., affective prosody) and the choice of words (i.e., semantics).

In this conference talk, Brenna O'Brien discusses what she loves most about JavaScript, the community. She covers why it's important to remember what it was like to start out in the community and channel that empathy into the resources we provide online, i.e. code examples without arbitrary jargon like "foo" and "bar". One of the best points to follow is removing condescending language, like "simply" and "just", while teaching others.

For the closing keynote of JSConfEu 2015, Carina C. Zona shows us the algorithms and artificial intelligence systems being designed at massive companies like Google, Flickr, Facebook, and Apple can backfire when they forget about the edge cases and lack empathy for all of the end users. A particularly interesting section covers racial bias passed down from the development of color photography into the calibration of digital cameras and screens.

Empathy is feeling with people.

This video was shared in several talks during WhatTheFest Berlin and is a fantastic intro for anyone researching empathy. The use of animation to make the subject more approachable and informative is very well done. It dives straight into the core of empathy as a means for connecting with others and pushing away judgement in an effort to understand.