Conversion via Twitter
By; Adrian Chen
Connect one of your ideas about empathy in Jamison or your chosen reading (or both) to what you read in Chen.
“Conversion via Twitter” by Adrian Chen is about a centralized view of a religious group and one member who had developed a sense of empathy through a communication platform called Twitter. A member of Westboro, a religious group, was brought up by the church learning ideas centered around what “God wants.” One idea was that “God hated gay people. And the rest of the world hated them, too” which was engraved in her mind as a social norm. As social media grew the church decided to create a Twitter account to further promote its message. Megan the group member, then created a fake account to see if their message was being received by the public. By creating this account on Twitter changed her entire view of the church system. Megan was sheltered by this religious group and Twitter opened her eyes to how their “message from God” was doing nothing but harm. She then developed a sense of empathy and compassion for the victims that they were targeting. She saw life from a different point of view. This was similar to Jamison’s expericence when he attended a medical conference for an unknown disease. He saw how the vitims felt and practiced empathy in order to comprehend there life.
