SAEDNEWS:In an age defined by endless scrolling and cinematic spectacle, our immersion in digital distraction has dulled our capacity for empathy—so much so that the genocide unfolding in Gaza now feels like just another muted backdrop to our curated online lives.
From the rise of cinema to today’s scroll‑culture, humanity has inched ever further from lived reality into a realm of hyperreal spectacle and emotional detachment. Once, we forged worlds in our heads—turning the printed page into landscapes of possibility. Now we sit, spellbound, before LED panels, our capacity for empathy flickering like a faulty bulb.
The first crack in our moral armour arrived with the celluloid screen: heroes and heroines projected larger than life, their trials unreal yet compelling. But it was the internet that delivered the coup de grâce. With every swipe, we traded contact with our neighbours—and the natural world—for an endless river of images engineered to grip our attention, commodify our emotions and cement our inertia.
This collective dissociation has profound consequences. In Gaza, children queue for scraps of bread while drones cast cold shadows overhead; elsewhere, on social media feeds, animated trailers and personality quizzes vie for clicks. The bombardment of suffering becomes just another headline, another momentary glance before we return to vacation selfies and viral cat videos. A war‑torn enclave is recast as virtual theatre—disturbing perhaps, but comfortably remote.
When Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, called out these “screens of indifference,” the United States slapped her with sanctions—the latest twist in a campaign to muzzle those who document atrocity. This punitive gesture is not just an attack on one voice: it is emblematic of power’s contempt for collective responsibility. As Francesca herself observed, “The powerful punish those who speak for the powerless. That is not strength. That is guilt.”
And so we drift, cradled by our devices, our moral compass recalibrated to the nearest trending topic. We honour war architects in gleaming halls of Congress while the bereaved in Gaza—17,000 orphans and counting—go unclaimed by our conscience. Our protests are reduced to hashtags; our outrage, to night‑time tweets. True solidarity, requiring sacrifice, looks painfully analogue.
It’s time to unplug from the algorithm and re‑engage with the world’s suffering—not as spectacle, but as shared humanity. Only then can we hope to reclaim our empathy before it fades entirely.
