MORALITY IN THE AGE OF VISIBILITY: ATTENTION, SENSITIVITY, AND ETHICAL RESPONSE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20151983Keywords:
moral attention, ethical response, attention economy, social acceleration, platform societyAbstract
This article examines how ethical response is shaped under conditions of increasing visibility in the digital age. Contemporary individuals are continuously exposed to global crises, human suffering, and various forms of injustice, creating a widespread expectation that greater visibility leads to stronger ethical engagement. However, this study argues that increased visibility does not automatically strengthen the continuity or intensity of ethical response. Instead, ethical response is shaped through attention processes and temporal experience. The article develops the concept of moral attention to account for these dynamics. This concept highlights that individuals evaluate ethical situations within the limits of their cognitive and emotional resources, and that the distribution of attention determines the direction and intensity of ethical response. The speed, flow, and fragmentation of digital environments weaken sustained attention, transforming ethical response into a series of short-lived and fluctuating reactions. Furthermore, ethical response is not evenly distributed. Factors such as proximity, identity, media circulation, and algorithmic visibility shape which events receive attention and which are neglected. In this sense, ethical response becomes selective and discontinuous. The article challenges approaches that treat ethical sensitivity as a stable and universal orientation and instead proposes a relational and attention-based understanding of morality in the digital age. The analysis is illustrated with brief digital case examples—such as the rapid rise and fall of hashtag campaigns and algorithmic filtering—to ground theoretical claims in observable dynamics.
References
Ahmed, S. (2015). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Bail, C. A. (2021). Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2011). Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Polity.
Beck, U. (2011). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage.
Bloom, P. (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Ecco.
Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Bruns, A. (2019). Are Filter Bubbles Real? Polity.
Buber, M. (2003). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Scribner.
Bucher, T. (2018). If... Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press.
Calhoun, C. (2009). Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream. Routledge.
Cameron, C. D., & Payne, B. K. (2020). The costs of empathy: When empathy is exhausting. Current Opinion in Psychology, 35, 90–94.
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton.
Castells, M. (2010). The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Polity.
Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Polity.
Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2017). The Mediated Construction of Reality. Polity.
Crary, J. (2015). *24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep*. Verso.
Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Harvard Business School Press.
Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Duke University Press.
Fassin, D. (2012). Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. University of California Press.
Giddens, A. (2000). Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. Routledge.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press.
Hari, J. (2022). Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. Crown.
Kende, A., van Zomeren, M., Ujhelyi, A., & Lantos, N. A. (2021). The social psychology of collective action in the digital age. Current Opinion in Psychology, 42, 58–63.
Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. (2005). The identified victim effect: An explanation for the preference for singular victims. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18(3), 157–167.
Levinas, E. (1991). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.
Moeller, S. D. (1999). Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. Routledge.
Newport, C. (2021). A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Portfolio.
Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford University Press.
Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Penguin.
Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press.
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Polity.
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest (pp. 37–72). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press.
Västfjäll, D., Slovic, P., Mayorga, M., & Peters, E. (2014). Compassion fade: Affect and charity are greatest for a single child in need. PLoS ONE, 9(6), e100115.
Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Ahmet Faruk YILDIRIM
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
