Schemata Theory: Bridging The Empathy Gap

Nowadays, the world is hyper-connected; screens allow communities across the globe to interact, welcoming in an age of global communication unlike anything before us. However, despite this, humanity has arguably never been more divided. With the world at our fingertips, we instead choose to stay in echo chambers, ignoring the topics and issues that truly need addressing. In a thundering flare of impassioned post-hardcore, SCHEMATA THEORY aim to dissect this notion on new album Unity In Time. We sat down with vocalist Myles Dyer to consider the impacts of the Digital Empathy Gap, touching on how society needs to work towards a sense of unity to allow environmental and humanitarian change.

When it comes to the digitally conscious, you can’t get a more experienced mind than Myles Dyer. With over a decade of documenting his life on YouTube, it’s fair to say that Myles has been intimately involved in the gradual growth of the digital landscape. “I started YouTube in 2006 when I was 18 and I just turned 35. YouTube was quite a new thing at the time and recently I’ve even been teaching in some schools, y’know, Digital Citizenship for YouTube, and some of the pupils I have say ‘sir! Your first YouTube video – I wasn’t even born then!’ and I’m like jeeeeeesus.”

We’ve reached a point where “people are commodifying their personalities,” Myles believes. “Anything you put online is a way of building status – and status is currency.” The real danger lies in this hunger for status, as it leaves no space for empathy. “There’s the notion of the Digital Empathy Gap; it’s very easy to hide behind the screen, build a persona, and hate people that you don’t agree with. When the majority of communication online is just text. We dehumanise each other.”

This dehumanisation of the other is partly due to the echo chambers technology and algorithmic timelines allow. “People are united, but in their own webs,” Myles notes, “and for me that is the ultimate dichotomy; as a society we have never been more unified, but in our own groups.”

Unity In Time explores just why these differing groups need to work towards some form of unification. Ram-packed with vital lyricisms and impassioned musical soundscapes, this is an album with purpose – to remind the listener of just how deeply humanity is connected. “It touches on how we’re connected with others, how we’re connected with ourselves, and it’s also how we’re connected with nature – because we are nature, we’re not above it. And, the phrase As Clouds Gather (the opening instrumental track) alludes to the idea that every human being is a dot – we’re all just a web of dots – and the job we have is to connect these dots together.”

From Prism’s exploration of the divided online “sea of faceless people that will try and destroy you in any way possible,” to Our Only Home’s assertion that “we are nature, we’re not above it”, every track seeks to highlight somewhere where these dots can connect. The thread throughout the album is a powerful, poignant longing for unity in all shapes and forms.

“There are so many individual topics we try to tackle,” Myles admits, “but it all comes back to the fact that these themes of connection are connected. And I’d love to say that that was the intention from the get-go, but it was when we took a step back one it was written and looked at it, that was clearly what the case was.”

And SCHEMATA THEORY’s work is a sign of how important it is to speak up about these topics – and to listen to other people voicing their own views on these issues. Voices touches on the very same idea, that we all have a voice, while interlude track Vantage Point compiles clips of people speaking from a multitude of different eras, generations and nations. Speaking on Vantage Point, Myles takes a moment to reflect on the thread that runs throughout the track: Carl Sagan’s photograph The Pale Blue Dot. A snapshot of a miniscule, marble-like Earth, yet “every single human being has ever been on that tiny marble, we’re fragile, and nobody is going to come and save us, we have to save us from ourselves.” We have to find common ground in order to reach a sense of global consciousness.

”In The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Jeremy Rifkin writes about about the history of empathy,” Myles tells us. Rifkin explores the idea that empathy is “tied to connection” – blood ties, language, religion – and now that has extended to digital connections, based on interests and online communities. “But the question that Jeremy Rifkin posed was: if we have been able to achieve empathy with complete strangers from all walks of life in our own countries, why can’t we achieve global empathy across the world? And that is the biggest challenge I think facing humanity today.”

So how do we go about this? Myles knows that it’s no simple task; “people think it’s a nice ‘cosy’ thing – but no, the most difficult part of unity is unifying with those you would normally disagree with.” But the possible struggles pale in comparison to the danger of never reaching agreement: “my fear is: can humanity reach global consciousness before we destroy ourselves?”

SCHEMATA THEORY are taking on a colossal duty with this new album – and it is truly commendable. While unity is of course the end-goal, Myles acknowledges the challenges of unity; “to unite does take time! A lot of this is gonna happen long after you and I have walked this planet! But that doesn’t mean there’s not a reason for fighting for it. If we’re all united even in smaller ways, in the macro it does actually have the potential to make seismic shifts.”

Unity In Time is out now via self-release.

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