Attention and Morality in the Attention Economy: What We Notice Shapes Who We Become

Attention and morality in the attention economy sound like separate debates — one about screens, one about character. A lecture at Arizona State University on 26 October 2026 treated them as the same question. Philosopher Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, speaking during the university’s sixth annual Humanities Week, argued that what we attend to shapes what we value, what we remember and what we decide. If she is right, the fight over your focus is not a distraction from ethics. It is ethics, happening upstream.

Information verified through 2 November 2026.

Attentiveness as a virtue, not a productivity trick

Caprioglio Panizza describes attention as active engagement, even when it is not fully conscious, and she calls attentiveness a virtue: the capacity to stay open to the world, take it in properly and respond as it deserves. “When we manage to be fully attentive — present and open — that might just be the root of goodness,” she told ASU News. That is a strong claim. It puts noticing ahead of intending. You cannot care well for what you never actually saw.

The older lineage behind the lecture matters here. Writing on Simone Weil, University of Galway researchers Michela Dianetti and Chiara Li Mandri describe attention as “a moral stance, a form of openness that requires the suspension of the ego,” in work discussed by The Irish Times. Weil starts moral duty from awareness of another person’s needs and lets obligations grow from there, rather than handing them down from abstract rights. Notice first. The duty follows.

Attention and morality in the attention economy: the value-collapse problem

A second account, from a University of Guelph dissertation on the ethics and cognitive science of the attention economy, pushes back on the familiar story that platforms hijack helpless users. Attention, it argues, is not a tank that gets drained. It is a capacity for value-guided selection, trained by habit and surroundings. The harm arrives through “value collapse”: friendship thins into follower counts, accomplishment into streaks, curiosity into whatever the feed serves next.

That reframing changes the remedy. When your phone buzzes, the dissertation argues, you have not lost control — you have made a fast decision based on values the platform helped teach you. Variable rewards and algorithmic tuning shape those values, the shaped values steer attention, and attention then reinforces the same values. The loop narrows what seems worth noticing at all. Breaking it means retraining judgement, not just rationing minutes.

Attentional freedom and democracy

The stakes are not only private. Caprioglio Panizza warns that attention “creates the stage upon which decisions are made,” and that politicians have grown skilled at presenting certain problems as central while steering focus away from others voters might rank higher, as ASU’s account of the lecture reports. Democratic choice, on this view, needs a degree of attentional freedom and control — citizens who can still choose what to dwell on.

Weil’s version carries a warning of its own. Dianetti and Li Mandri acknowledge the risk of feeling overwhelmed by obligation to every cause at once, and argue that the attention economy deepens ecological and social crises by driving cultural inattention. A phone that lets you attend to everything, the Irish Times column concludes, can leave you attending — in Weil’s demanding sense — to nothing.

Analysis: These accounts converge on an uncomfortable point. The scarce resource is not time on a screen; it is the trained habit of noticing what deserves a response. Panizza locates goodness in sustained, open attention. The Guelph research locates harm in values quietly retrained by metrics. Put together, moral repair looks less like a digital detox and more like practice: choosing, repeatedly and on purpose, what gets your full presence — a person, a place, a problem — until the choosing becomes character.

There is an institutional footnote worth noting. Caprioglio Panizza is affiliated with the Strother School of Radical Attention, whose co-founder delivered the Humanities Institute’s distinguished lecture earlier this year, and ASU placed her talk inside a week built around America’s semiquincentennial — 250 years of democracy, examined through the question of what citizens can still manage to notice. The Galway researchers land in a similar place from the opposite direction: faced with more vulnerability than any one person can answer, they argue for collective spaces where people confront difficult realities together rather than scrolling past them alone. Attention, in both accounts, is partly a shared infrastructure. Streets, classrooms and legislatures either protect it or spend it.

Photo: Shixart1985, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sources

1. ASU News — What the attention crisis means for our democracy — https://news.asu.edu/b/20261019-what-attention-crisis-means-our-democracy
2. University of Guelph Atrium — The Ethics and Cognitive Science of the Attention Economy — https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/items/e98d728b-efa2-4eec-8fc5-c97151ec7b6c
3. The Irish Times (Unthinkable) — The attention economy has made us less attentive, but there is a solution — https://irishtimes-irishtimes-staging.cdn.arcpublishing.com/opinion/2025/10/06/unthinkable-the-attention-economy-has-made-us-less-attentive-but-there-is-a-solution/