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arxiv: 2605.05651 · v1 · submitted 2026-05-07 · 💻 cs.HC

Recognition: unknown

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

Jaewon Kim , Lindsay Popowski , Louisa Conwill , Elizabeth `Lizzie' Li , Meryl Ye , Jiaying `Lizzy' Liu , Jose A. Guridi , Theia Henderson
show 7 more authors
Bingxu Han Dennis Wang Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang Susan Wyche Yasmine Kotturi Gillian R. Hayes Angela D. R. Smith
Authors on Pith no claims yet

Pith reviewed 2026-05-08 07:38 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.HC
keywords social technologycare ethicssustained engagementsocietal challengesplatform designmoral psychologyuser burnoutcapacity to care
0
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The pith

Dominant social media architectures stall caring about societal challenges at initial awareness, blocking paths to sustained engagement.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper argues that the barrier to addressing large-scale problems such as climate change and injustice is not apathy but limited capacity for ongoing engagement, which current platforms exacerbate through attention-focused designs. It draws on Tronto's care ethics to show that effective caring requires progressing beyond awareness to include responsibility, competence, and community. Without support for these later phases, users experience distress, overwhelm, and disengagement, especially young people encountering global issues online. The authors examine how social technology can be redesigned to support the full caring process and enable engagement that lasts without burnout.

Core claim

Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase. Tronto's framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. The paper examines how social technology design shapes the conditions for sustained engagement with societal challenges, identifying platform features that deplete or support the capacity to care. It calls for design directions for sustainable care that people can maintain over time without burning out.

What carries the argument

Tronto's care ethics framework, which outlines that good care requires awareness followed by responsibility, competence, and community

If this is right

  • Platform features that connect users to specific responsibilities could move engagement beyond passive awareness of issues.
  • Tools that build competence through guided actions or resources would enable more effective and consistent responses to challenges.
  • Community-oriented designs could reduce the isolation that contributes to overwhelm when caring about distant problems.
  • Overall shifts toward these supports might lower distress and disengagement rates among users who encounter societal issues online.
  • Younger users in particular could maintain involvement with global problems over longer periods without psychological costs.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • This approach could be adapted to other digital domains such as online learning or civic tools to support longer-term participation.
  • Measuring real-world outcomes like action completion rates after design changes would provide direct tests of the framework's applicability.
  • Successful implementations might influence how platforms handle news and activism content to favor constructive responses over repeated exposure.

Load-bearing premise

Tronto's care ethics framework maps directly onto digital platform interactions so that design changes can increase sustained engagement without introducing new burnout or disengagement.

What would settle it

A controlled study that deploys redesigned platform features supporting responsibility, competence, and community, then measures long-term user engagement rates and burnout levels compared to standard social media.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.05651 by Angela D. R. Smith, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Bingxu Han, Dennis Wang, Elizabeth `Lizzie' Li, Gillian R. Hayes, Jaewon Kim, Jiaying `Lizzy' Liu, Jose A. Guridi, Lindsay Popowski, Louisa Conwill, Meryl Ye, Susan Wyche, Theia Henderson, Yasmine Kotturi.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Tronto’s phases of care. Good care is a cyclical view at source ↗
read the original 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.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 1 minor

Summary. The manuscript is a position paper and workshop proposal arguing that people care about societal challenges like climate change but lack capacity for sustained engagement due to psychological costs and social media architectures that amplify awareness (attentiveness) while providing few pathways for responsibility, competence, or responsiveness. Drawing on Tronto's care ethics and moral psychology, it claims dominant platforms stall the caring process at its earliest phase, leading to distress and disengagement, and invites identification of designs that support sustainable care without burnout.

Significance. If the interpretive mapping from Tronto's framework to platform mechanics can be made concrete and testable, the work could usefully extend HCI and platform studies by offering a care-ethics lens for designing against overwhelm. It correctly identifies a timely gap between awareness-raising and action affordances, and the workshop format could surface falsifiable design hypotheses for future empirical work.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The central claim that 'Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase' is load-bearing for the workshop's premise yet remains unsupported by any concrete mapping of Tronto's phases (attentiveness-responsibility-competence-responsiveness) to observable platform mechanics such as feed algorithms, notification designs, or action affordances. No platform studies are cited showing differential progression rates or UI-level blocking of later phases, reducing the claim to an untested analogy rather than a mechanism that design interventions could target.
  2. [Abstract] The manuscript invokes Tronto's framework to explain why caring at scale is difficult but supplies no operationalization of 'stall' in UI terms (e.g., what counts as successful transition from attentiveness to responsibility on a given platform) or any falsifiable prediction about how proposed design changes would increase sustained engagement without introducing new burnout risks.
minor comments (1)
  1. [Abstract] The abstract would benefit from one or two brief, specific platform examples (e.g., how infinite-scroll feeds support awareness but lack low-friction pathways to local action) to ground the argument for readers unfamiliar with the cited literature.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive review and for recognizing the timely gap between awareness-raising and sustained action affordances in social technology. We address the major comments point by point below, clarifying the scope of this position paper and workshop proposal while agreeing to strengthen concrete elements where feasible.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: The central claim that 'Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase' is load-bearing for the workshop's premise yet remains unsupported by any concrete mapping of Tronto's phases (attentiveness-responsibility-competence-responsiveness) to observable platform mechanics such as feed algorithms, notification designs, or action affordances. No platform studies are cited showing differential progression rates or UI-level blocking of later phases, reducing the claim to an untested analogy rather than a mechanism that design interventions could target.

    Authors: We agree the claim would be strengthened by explicit mappings. As a position paper synthesizing Tronto's framework with platform studies observations, the manuscript relies on interpretive synthesis rather than new empirical data. In revision we will add concrete UI examples (e.g., infinite-scroll feeds sustaining attentiveness without responsibility affordances such as collective-action tools, or notification designs that reward passive consumption over competence-building features) and cite additional platform studies documenting attention capture and limited progression to action. This keeps the workshop invitational while making the analogy more actionable. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Abstract] The manuscript invokes Tronto's framework to explain why caring at scale is difficult but supplies no operationalization of 'stall' in UI terms (e.g., what counts as successful transition from attentiveness to responsibility on a given platform) or any falsifiable prediction about how proposed design changes would increase sustained engagement without introducing new burnout risks.

    Authors: We accept that the draft lacks explicit operationalization and testable predictions. The workshop format is intended to co-develop these elements with participants. In revision we will add preliminary operational definitions (e.g., 'stall' as absence of UI pathways supporting responsibility or competence, measurable via engagement metrics that remain at passive consumption) and example hypotheses (e.g., introduction of shared-responsibility features increases sustained engagement without elevating burnout scores). These will serve as discussion starters rather than definitive claims. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: conceptual argument applies external Tronto framework without self-referential reduction

full rationale

The paper is a workshop proposal advancing a conceptual claim that dominant social media stall caring at the attentiveness phase per Tronto's ethics. No equations, fitted parameters, predictions, or derivations appear in the provided text. The argument invokes an external cited framework (Tronto) and platform studies literature without any self-citation chain, ansatz smuggling, or renaming of known results by the authors themselves. The central assertion is an interpretive mapping rather than a result forced by the paper's own inputs or prior author work. This is the expected non-finding for a non-technical position paper.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on the applicability of Tronto's care ethics to social technology without new supporting evidence or derivation in the abstract.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Tronto's care ethics framework (awareness, responsibility, competence, community) applies to and can diagnose problems in digital engagement with societal challenges
    Invoked to explain why current platforms stall caring and to guide design directions.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5551 in / 1137 out tokens · 65485 ms · 2026-05-08T07:38:31.364348+00:00 · methodology

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Reference graph

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