The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges

2026-05-07

AI Summary

While social media enhances public awareness of pressing issues such as the climate crisis and social injustice, it often lacks supportive mechanisms, thereby exacerbating psychological burdens and engagement fatigue—particularly among young users. Drawing on Tronto’s ethics of care framework and integrating insights from moral psychology and platform studies, this work proposes the concept of “sustainable care” to systematically embed care ethics into social media design. By analyzing how current technologies shape users’ capacities to care, the study identifies key design features that move beyond attention-centric architectures toward supporting the full arc of care—from awareness to action. This approach offers both a theoretical foundation and innovative design directions for fostering long-term, responsible, and community-supported civic engagement.

Abstract

People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action. The result is rising distress, overwhelm, and disengagement -- particularly among young people who encounter global suffering through platforms designed for attention capture rather than constructive response. This workshop examines how social technology design shapes the conditions for sustained engagement with societal challenges. Drawing on Tronto's care ethics framework and research in moral psychology and platform studies, we ask why caring at scale is difficult and how social media can both exacerbate and potentially mitigate this difficulty. Tronto's framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase. We invite researchers and designers to identify platform designs that deplete or support the capacity to care, and to develop design directions for \textit{sustainable care}: engagement that people can maintain over time without burning out.

Problem

• sustained engagement
• capacity to care
• social technology design
• care ethics
• platform studies

Innovation

• sustainable care
• care ethics
• social technology design
• moral psychology
• platform studies