WASHINGTON, D.C. – Americans are increasingly skeptical about the future. The news is full of recession, debt, and climate change. There seems to be no consensus on ways to solve our problems. Even worse, we cannot agree on what the problems are. For example, would-be presidential candidates ignore decades of painstaking research to proclaim that climate change is a hoax.

We have powerful tools at hand: science, technology, and the Internet, which is an unparalleled communications system. The problem is that human communication has broken down. Recently the New Yorker wrote in despair, "The decade since the [9/11] attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common narrative in this country."

As a deaf man, I have an unusual perspective on communication. I was born with a severe hearing loss and went completely deaf in 2001. Deafness not only makes it hard to hear; it also makes it hard to empathize. When you're always on the outskirts of the group, it's hard to appreciate that other people have feelings as strong as yours. These days, America seems to be deaf as well.

In 2001 I received a cochlear implant, an implanted computer that takes over the job of sending auditory information to the brain. It made me, in a way, a "cyborg" — a person whose nervous system has transistors as well as neurons.

Learned to see the humanity
The world sounded completely different. It took me a year to learn how to hear all over again. But that also motivated me to start my life over again. Among other things, I attended interpersonal workshops where people practiced looking one another in the eyes (a big challenge for me, since I had been trained to lip-read) and listening silently to each other speaking. I learned to see the humanity in people very different from myself. After years of disappointments, my social life flowered.

Deafness broke me down. Technology inspired me to rebuild. Can technology equally transform our society? It has certainly transformed it already; one has only to look at the difference between offices in 1975 and 2011. We have far more tools for communicating than we have ever had.

But technology alone will not cure America's deafness. Meaningful change comes only from learning how to listen, understand, empathize, and negotiate. The intellectual foundation for that kind of politics has already been laid; the last few years have seen the publication of remarkable books about using emotional intelligence in politics.

A hunger to connect
And I think the social foundation is being laid, too, even if it is not yet mature. I see the clear hunger of many young people to connect using technology. Facebook and Twitter sustain their conversations and bind their communities. They are far more open to diverse lifestyles and perspectives than their parents were. To them, a politics of fear and anger simply will not make sense.

The great challenge of our time is to learn how to use our tools to communicate with each other richly and see past our divisions. Once we have done that, we can build a clear-eyed, technologically adept politics for the 21st century.

Washington, D.C.-based author Michael Chorost, Ph.D., will deliver the John Beardsley Lecture Oct. 6 at the University of Minnesota.