Grade 11

New Media Challenge

A Lack of Empathy – By Stefano Moino

 

Courtesy of http://sds.parsons.edu/transdesign/the-problem-with-a-single-story/

“Empathy in college students, over a 30-year period, has reduced by 48%,” according to an analysis by Sarah Konrath, a researcher and philanthropist at the University of Indiana. The ability to understand and share feelings with others, (empathy), is on a decline due to the explosion of, “overly simplistic and sometimes false perceptions we form about individuals, groups, or countries,” (single stories).

The single story has been told to all of us. At young ages we are more perceptible and vulnerable to the single story, yet even as we grow older we can be just as vulnerable to its effects. One cause of the single story is social media; according to Christopher Seneca, a writer at “WIRED,” an online news blog, Social media “creates echo chambers in which a user is never presented with alternative perspectives,” this means that one can fed the information that is specified to them so they don’t always see other people’s perspectives. Once fed information that one believe’s to be true, one may tend to defend this idea even if this idea may not entirely be true.

Social media not only shows us information that we generally associate with, but it also labels people by their skin colour, religion, place of origin, Etc. For example, news stories, “mentioning Muslims are far more likely to be negative than those in any other category. Of all stories mentioning Muslims or Islam, 78 percent are negative, compared with only 40 percent of those about Catholics, 46 percent about Jews and 49 percent about Hindus. Muslims are clearly distinctive as the only group associated with overwhelmingly negative coverage,” states Erik Bleich, a journalist at the Washington Post.

The Single story can be very powerful especially in the hands of people of power, as a story itself can be a very powerful tool. According to Chimamanda Adichie a writer in Nigeria, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Adiche is saying that stories can be very powerful, you must fact check and see both sides of the story before reacting or you are giving more power to a single story that in its entirety may not be true.

Single stories plague our societies and cultures, but there are also many solutions to this issue. According to Michael Wesch, an anthropologist and university professor, one solution is to face what you do not know and learn about it, one step at a time, “to put us in touch with the sacred story of life the trials and tribulations of which are sometimes hard to face, yet when we do so that’s when we are gifted the gift of life.” Someone admitting that they are blinded by a single story can be the toughest part of seeing the bigger picture and becoming more empathetic, but the first step is the most important part.

A challenge that Wesch posed was to talk with some one that you would not normally associate with. My New Media teacher, Ms. Shong, then gave my class this same challenge of talking to someone who you don’t normally talk to, and I was assigned Noah Dal Santo. He and I had previously gone to middle school with each other and had had some classes before, so I had general idea of who he was and he had a general idea of who I was. For our assignment we had to post a picture of us along with some questions that we had answered with this challenge we had been assigned some questions like what we were interested in or comparing our differences, in answering these questions we learned more about each other than the single stories we had of each other.

Empathy, in recent years, has been declining in people around the world due to single stories and their over simplified description of people, places, and things. A single story may or may not be entirely true, but that single story does not make up who or what that person or place is or has become. One may assume that they would not fall into the traps of a single story, but it can be easy to be blind if you are immersed.

Journalism 11 – Feature story

What happens to our old phones? You might want to know

The truth behind the e-waste recycling problem.

49.8 million tons, 9023 times a second! This is how many electronics have been thrown away in 2018 and how many phones are ‘binned’ every second. (Water Bear Network)

Electronic waste or e-waste is growing into a major problem for many countries around the world; E-waste is particularly bad for these countries and their environments because of the substantial amounts of toxic substances used to create these devices. This problem is growing fast as recyclers and third world countries are constantly being bombarded with tens of millions of tons of e-waste every year. The devices that we seem to not be able to live without, our phones, our earbuds, and our laptops, are becoming increasingly smaller, less metallic, and overall harder to recycle, resulting in even more waste.

One major problem with solving the crisis is that there is such a mass supply of phones and other devices that recyclers are being “bombarded” with, to such a degree that recycling companies like Sims Recycling solutions are struggling to keep up: “most people prefer to get rid of their current cellphone every 20 months or so when a better model inevitably comes out.” This “new device” trend strains our natural resources and is wasteful. According to Joe McCarthy, a writer at the Global Citizen, more than 5 billion people across the globe own cell phones, and many people are regularly buying new ones. Consumer Reports further supports this notion by stating that, “more than 1.5 billion cell phones will ship in 2021. That’s around 1 for every 5 people alive.”

[pullquote class =”left”]Multi-national billion-dollar companies are using dangerous and toxic chemicals for their own personal profits.[/pullquote]The recycling process needed for these devices is not only extremely dangerous, but it has also become harder and harder to achieve. As many people may have noticed, newer devices are getting smaller and more efficient; the part they do not see, however, is that these smaller devices are harder to recycle, use less metallic parts and they use different chemicals that, if not disposed of properly, can be very damaging to the environment. According to Sean Magann, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Sims Recycling Solutions, “desktop computers were once made out of almost 100% metals and these metals were easy to recover; now more items are plastic based, and the average size of each device has decreased.” Devices today are smaller and contain less metals that recyclers can sell to “stay afloat” in a heavily capitalistic society; this has led to recyclers to not be able to keep up with the steadily growing number of phones being “binned.” Many devices will not be accepted by recyclers because there are so few metals in it that it would cost more to take apart then to purchase it. According to a United Nations report, 53.6 million tons of e-waste was “binned” during 2019, yet only 17.4 percent of it was properly disposed of.

E-waste contains very toxic chemicals that leeches into the surrounding environment and poisons everything in the area. These toxic chemicals are being used by tech companies to create “new and improved” devices, that no one truly needs. Alexandra Ossola, a writer at Popular Science news blog writes that, “e-waste only takes up two percent of what is deposited in landfills, yet it is responsible for around 70 percent of the toxic waste that is found there.” Using these chemicals in the creation of these devices is solely to increase the profit of multi billion-dollar companies. These chemicals not only poison the environment, if not disposed of properly, but they also create a more dangerous workplace for people trying to recycle and recover materials from these old devices. “These workers are exposed to nickel, cadmium, and mercury, among other toxic fumes, which leak into the surrounding air, ground and drinking water,” states Vox writer Peter Holgate.

Due to the toxicity of many of these chemicals, many countries try to put off the issue at hand and send these materials to different countries that may not be considered “first world countries. According to Vox, one example of this was the Motorola Razr. After the Razr’s sales started to “die off” in North America, they sent all these left-over phones to South America. The Global Citizen’s Joe McCarty writes that “a lot of countries simply ship their e-waste to other countries, where toxic e-waste substances like lead, cadmium, and mercury cause environmental and health problems. In 2016, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put tracking devices on 200 discarded devices in the US and followed them to Hong Kong, Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada, and Kenya, demonstrating the sprawling nature of e-waste management.” Sending this problem overseas hides what these companies truly use to make our phones and other devices out of; these companies need to start fixing this issue now, before the harm to people and the planet become irreparable.

E-waste has developed into a steadily growing problem that many countries are struggling to contain, due to mass production and toxicity in devices that we can’t seem to live without. Multi-national billion-dollar companies are using dangerous and toxic chemicals for their own personal profits, and not taking into account the environment or the lives of the people trying to “recycle” this issue. As a world community we have a duty to think twice about buying new devices, and contributing to this ongoing global issue.

Feature photo curtesy of jpminda.com
Contrast photo curtesy of sustainability.au and apple.com

This “One-Pager” is about Empathy and Apathy. Over the past week in English class I learned about the world’s decrease in empathy due to devices and various social mediums. I express my thoughts on this subject through these four quotes and my explanation of why I chose them.