For years, I've been anticipating the death of literacy due to our high-tech world; I didn't expect the loss of human empathy too. But according to a new study from the University of Southern California, the rapid-fire stream of information from sites like Twitter and Facebook may be stunting our emotional growth. We're deluged with more information than we can process, the report states, and as researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang says, "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality."

Jason Calacanis, an early Internet pioneer and champion, refers to this as Internet Asperger's Syndrome. On his blog, Calacanis.com, the author describes how he's seen Twitter and other new media transform the ways we interact. Today, he writes, it's all about the numbers: how many followers do you have, how many page-views do you get, what is your monthly subscriber count? But numbers aren't human beings. No longer do we see the eyes of the person sharing heartbreaking news; no longer do we think twice about flaming a fellow forumite on a discussion board. It's all removed, virtual, computerized.

Except it isn't. There are still real people at the ends of each Internet connection, and sometimes the anonymity of online communiques dehumanizes them for those on the other end -- and vice versa. To cite an extreme but very real example: the case of Choi Jin Sil, the South Korean film star who reportedly killed herself last fall because of rumors circulating the web about her.

When it came time for our weekly editorial meetings, I found that most of us had difficulty looking each other in the eye, and there was very little rapport among the staff outside of work. A difference of opinion or misunderstanding might never get resolved, and fester until the parties involved could only work together via IM. It got so tense in that office that I developed a severe muscle spasm in my neck and could barely move my head for months. Nothing virtual about that.

Internet Asperger's, indeed. And it's only gotten worse in the past decade. In 2007, McKenzie Funk wrote a harrowing piece for Harper's about his time at a Chinese Internet addiction clinic. It's a brilliant article, but only read it if you're prepared to panic that you, too, might have a problem.

Or it might help you relax, because you most likely don't spend nearly as much time online as the people Funk describes in his article. (Have you spent days on-end at an Internet cafe without eating or sleeping? I didn't think so.)

Either way, I find it encouraging when someone like Calacanis sounds an alarm about our increasingly digitized lifestyle. And the fact that he wrote about it on his blog, and I'm writing about it here, can be taken as a positive sign that it's possible to be of the 21st Century and weary of it at the same time.

[Image: Pasquale D'Silva]

P.O.V "Beyond Hatred" tells a heartbreaking story of the brutal murder of a French gay man and his family's unique grieving process. Directed by Olivier Meyrou.

In September 2002, three skinheads were roaming a park in Rheims, France, looking to "do an Arab" when they settled for a gay man instead. Twenty-nine-year-old François Chenu fought back fiercely, but he was beaten unconscious and dumped in a river, where he drowned. This acclaimed French vérité film is the story of the crime's aftermath -- above all, of the Chenu family's brave and heartrending struggle to seek justice while trying to make sense of such pointless violence and unbearable loss. With remarkable dignity, they fight to transcend hatred and the inevitable desire for revenge.

Watch this remarkable documentary on PBS Tuesday, June 30 at 10pm Eastern.

I was in a public space with two large TVs tuned to CNN on Friday, and news of MJ was everywhere. He dominated the front page of the Times and every other paper that morning, too. The subway was full of people reading articles about him. And above ground, he's all anyone seemed to be talking about.

Then it occurred to me: if Michael Jackson hadn't died, we all would have instead been talking and reading about one of the country's front-runners for the Republican ticket in the 2012 presidential election, and how he used tax payers' money to visit his mistress in Argentina. We'd have been talking about how he publicly denounced such behavior in other politicians just a few years ago, revealing himself to be a hypocrite who's arrogant enough to believe he could get away with it.

Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina who went missing over Father's Day weekend, only to turn up a few days later claiming that he'd been hiking the Appalachian Trail, was the hot story on Thursday morning. He had just confessed to his affair, and a case was mounting against him for all the betrayals and hypocrisies listed above. What's more, the GOP had just lost someone it was calling one of its strongest contenders against Barack Obama just three years from now.

But by the next day, he was a sidebar, and the news -- TV, newspapers, blogs, and chit-chat around the water cooler -- was all Michael.

Back to Sanford: when a major politician compromises his oaths, shouldn't we care enough to talk about it? To the media's credit, most outlets continue to run news about Mark Sanford as that story unfolds, but you'd be hard-pressed to find places where it's being discussed over the passing of the man whose life in the spotlight, I think, is exactly what killed him.

Let's honor the memory of Michael Jackson. He was amazing. But let's also give him a break, now that we've remembered the dance moves, controversies, and myriad contradictions that defined one of the greatest performers that's ever lived. May he rest not as he lived: in peace.

[Image: South Carolina Governor's Office]