The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges
For researchers and designers of social technology, this work reframes the problem of disengagement from societal issues as a design challenge, offering a new lens to evaluate and improve platform architectures.
The paper argues that sustained engagement with societal challenges is hindered not by apathy but by the psychological costs of caring at scale, which social media architectures exacerbate. It proposes using Tronto's care ethics framework to design platforms that support sustainable engagement without burnout.
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.