empathy or ethnocentrism?

Freedom of speech is a powerful tool.  However, can a lack of accountability cause the loss of respect or even empathy for one another?

Today in my sociology class we were talking about ethnocentrism.  Soon, this conversation led to the activity on the internet and how with this open platform, we can all become critics.  The professor mentioned the use of sociology in exploring the reasons why society evolves as it does.  This made me wonder if and why society has lost empathy as a result of the internet and if this is why so much negativity manifests itself there.

The professor prodded me further and asked why I thought this was the case.  I answered that I believed it was because the internet provides a certain anonymity which allows people to say things they would not otherwise say to someone’s face.  Although the internet has connected us and brought us closer together, it has also enabled us to remain distant and inflict insult/judgment on each other without consequences.

Perhaps there has always been this amount of negativity and lack of empathy throughout generations.   They just never had the opportunity to voice it as we do today.  However, it does make me fear that current and future generations may have a difficult time learning how to build healthy social skills which encourage ethnocentrism.  Though the internet exposes us to a vast diversity of people, does it also teach us to accept and respect those differences or simply give opportunities to freely criticize each other?

Freedom of speech is a powerful tool.  So how can we use it to build our society rather than tear one another down?