The other day, a classmate I have not seen since puberty contacted me out of the blue, asking if I was in New York City because he thought he had seen me there. I was glad to hear from someone I had once known, but also incredulous. Why would he think he would recognize me after all this time? I am pretty sure I would not recognize most of my classmates from grade school, if I was not expecting to see them. If he and I were in a NYC subway car together, I would likely never even notice him. Looking him up on Facebook, I could see traces of the child I had known in his adult face, but were I to encounter him in the world, I would never pay enough attention to notice the resemblance.

My awareness of what (or who) exists in the world, and even what exists in this room with me at this moment, is constrained by my attention, and my attention is shaped by who I am—my habits, my values, my concerns, etc. After my classmate contacted me, I wondered how often I fail to notice people I once knew because they are too far out of mind. How often do people I once knew pass through my world without my knowledge, as if they were never there? My classmate brought my awareness to how my attention defines the world as I know it by making me reflect on what might be left out. Conversely, the world-defining capacity of attention may also become apparent when something suddenly enters our awareness.

I was born in New York City. My mother says she only started noticing the babies of New York City after she became pregnant. Suddenly, it seemed like babies were everywhere. She knew objectively that there were not more babies in New York City than before, but there certainly were more babies in her New York City, the one shaped by her attention. My mother was undergoing a transformation into someone who could be described as “my mother.” Her values and concerns were evolving, her habits of attention were evolving, and as a result, her world was changing around her.

Importantly, just as I am not exercising any volition if I fail to notice someone I once knew on the subway, my mother was not exercising her volition to start noticing babies. She made the choice to have a child, and that changed the way she passively saw the world. While we can direct our attention, it often runs below our intentional control, reflecting our habits, values, and concerns without our deliberative input. When we are not directing our attention, it is nevertheless presenting us with a curated version of the world around us.

During the pandemic, I, along with millions of my peers, downloaded the explosively popular social media app TikTok. The app is built around a phantasmagoric carousel of looping videos, three minutes long or less, which you navigate by swiping from video to video. The app employs an algorithm to curate which videos will come up next in your feed (also known as your “For You” page, or “FYP”). As soon as I started using the app, it began cluing into my interests, showing me videos of academics teaching about Ancient Greece, rock climbers executing gravity defying tricks, and women learning romantic partner dances together. In my early days on the app, I didn’t follow users or like videos. However, as I swiped quickly past some videos and lingered on others, the app was learning what captures my attention, and feeding me more and more of that content in order to keep me logged on, while hiding the type of content I swiped quickly past out of view.

My habits of attention shaped my experience of TikTok, just as they shape my experience of the real world. On TikTok, this effect is particularly dramatic because it is augmented by the algorithm, which works off the same curatorial principle. In both cases, my unselfconscious habits of attention create a seamless stream of information or “content,” catering to my existing habits, values, and concerns. On TikTok, and other digital platforms, this feature comes under fire for creating “echo-chambers”—environments that isolate people from any information or “content” that falls outside their world view, cutting them off from people who could provide challenging or novel perspectives. In these digital spaces, the algorithmic curation of material for each user is considered a threat to its users both ethically and epistemically. Given the similarity between our experience of TikTok and our everyday life, we may have analogous concerns about the way our habits of attention define our experience of the world off the app.

Certainly, the fact that we can only attend to a small part of the world available to us in any given moment severely limits our knowledge, especially because we are often entirely ignorant of what is left out. When what is excluded from our attention is morally relevant, our ability to act morally is limited by this ignorance. In some cases, it could be argued that our ignorance itself is a moral failing. When we are ignorant of the suffering of those around us because we persistently fail to pay attention to their attempts to communicate their distress, we have failed them morally. Writ on a large scale, we can see this kind of morally valanced ignorance when the powers-that-be in a nation and the citizens that lead comfortable lives within the status quo fail to pay attention to the suffering of oppressed groups within their country. 

For now, however, I want to focus on the small scale. The other day, my friend and I attended a party together. I met another philosophy-aficionado at the party and quickly fell into an engrossed conversation about the philosophical problems we were each working through. Outside my circle of attention, my friend was struggling to find a conversation partner, and growing increasingly uncomfortable at the party. When my philosophical conversation finally ended, my friend approached me to express the fact that she really wanted to leave. While the stakes were low in this situation, I still feel that neglecting to pay attention to my friend once we arrived at the party was a moral failing—I failed to be a good friend. I would like to be the kind of friend who notices when my companion at a party is not having a good time, and who makes an effort to either improve my friend’s experience or accompany her home. When my philosophical conversation absorbed all my attention, I was not the kind of friend I would like to be.

However, I only achieved this level of awareness after the conversation was over, when my attention was freed, and my friend took the initiative to lay her needs directly before me. At the time, my focus on the conversation at hand was seamless, and did not invite reflection or deliberation. I did not decide to overlook my friend’s needs­­; I was not even aware of my friend’s needs because my attention, and my party, had shrunk to the size of a single conversation. I trust that at the next party, this evening will be on my mind, and my attention will reflect that. However, the point remains that my awareness of that party will also be limited to the curated version supplied by my attention. There always may be something morally important left out. My capacity to be morally good is limited by what is and what is not in my world as defined by my attention.

One possible reaction to this reality is to give up on what I don’t know, and do my best to conduct myself in light of the information I have at hand, as filtered through my habits of attention. I am disinclined to settle for this response. I would like to hold myself at least somewhat responsible for my ignorance toward my friend, and any other instances of moral ignorance I may unknowingly hold, because I would like to think I can do better. The question is: how do I push against the limitations of my own habits of attention from within them, where I do not know what I do not know? When my friend asserted her needs to me at the party, she expanded my circle of attention. (Similarly, political protest works to do this on the political stage, although the nuances of that case are too many to address here.) However, assuming we do not want the onus always to fall on others, is there any way we can initiate growth from within the limits of our own awareness? I believe the way users interact with TikTok (and other digital platforms) offers an answer.

Many TikTok users claim their algorithm knows information about them, like their sexuality or mental health condition, before they do. There was a period when my FYP was full of women who had recently realized they were queer, and cited TikTok as fundamental to that realization. They did not fully recognize their queerness until they downloaded the app and noticed more and more queer content appearing on their FYP. Before they acknowledged it themselves, the algorithm realized their eyes were lingering on members of the same gender. To many such women, the algorithm’s reflection of their habits of attention back to them was a gift because it revealed something about themselves that they needed a nudge to recognize. The discrepancy between their self-understanding and their habits of attention (revealed to them by their FYP) created the opportunity for self-examination and new insight. In this way, TikTok’s capacity to mirror users’ habits of attention back to them has the potential to contribute to users’ flourishing through the gift of self-knowledge.

Those women experienced a productive conflict between how they conceived of themselves and what they were seeing that interrupted their experience and drove them to reflection. However, more often, we do not experience conflict between our self-conception and what is directly in front of us unless we interrupt ourselves to reflect. To take an example from a different digital platform, each year the music streaming service Spotify makes users’ listening data available to them. One day, someone asked me to describe my taste in music, so I scrolled back through the playlist Spotify created of the songs I had played most over the past year, trying to figure out what the songs had in common. That was the first time I realized there were next to no male vocalists on my playlist. When I am listening to music, I rarely think about the gender of the singer, so I had not noticed myself listening almost exclusively to female singers until I had the opportunity to reflect on the patterns embedded in my listening habits.

Spotify’s year in review playlist and TikTok’s FYP track these patterns and present them back to us in a way that makes it easier to reflect on otherwise difficult-to-notice patterns. While it may be more challenging, we can do the same in the real world as well. If my friend had not confronted me with her needs at that party, I hope that, in time, I would have noticed I tend to spend my parties holed up in the corner engaging in philosophical conversation. I maintain that this is often the best way to spend a party, but if I can reflect on my habit of attending to these conversations at the expense of all else, I can deliberate about whether that is the best way to spend this evening.

Within the limits of our circle of attention, and within TikTok’s algorithmic curation, we may not be able to see what is left out of our world. However, what we can see is a reflection of our habits, values, and concerns, subconsciously expressing themselves through the filter of our attention. This reflection may not reliably show us all that is in the world, but it is an important source of information about ourselves. This information invites us to be more deliberative about how we pay attention in order to better align with the sort of person we want to be.

Many TikTok users have noticed patterns in their FYP and started being more deliberative about how they are spending their attention on the app. Some users notice the onset of a depressive spiral when all the content on their FYP becomes increasingly pessimistic, and will start lingering on happier videos, even if it takes an effort at first, in order to pull up from the escalating emotional nose-dive. Other users notice their FYP disproportionately features white content-creators, and deliberately make the choice not to swipe past videos created by people of color because they do not want the biases they are exhibiting in their non-deliberative patterns of attention to build a whites-only world around them. In each case, the users reflect on their FYP and realize they are revealing habits, values, or concerns that they are enacting but do not endorse. By taking deliberative control over their habits of attention, they are not only trying to change what is on their FYP, but also trying to change those habits, values or concerns.

In the Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch writes about the moral significance of attention, which she takes to be the “proper and characteristic mark of the active moral agent” (33).  In her picture, it is through our attention that we exercise our moral agency. She writes, “if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value around us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments most of the business of choosing is already over” (36). She has, for the purposes of her theory, defined attention as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality” (33). We have been exploring how even attention that is not so virtuous will imperceptibly build up structures of value around us, and when we are not consciously directing our gaze, it can undermine our moral agency, taking us further from the kind of person we would like to be. (Murdoch would call this unvirtuous form of attention “looking”). In the modern world, our attention is increasingly sought out by digital platforms that make money off it. Overall, the tactics these platforms employ erode our attentional (and therefore moral) agency. The silver lining, if you care to look for it, is the way their attempts to monopolize our attention present our attention back to us as an object for reflection. There is, however, only so far the most just and loving gaze can get you on an app that cycles through three-minute content from strangers you will never meet. The real trick is learning to perceive our patterns of attention in the real world. This reflective self-knowledge is paramount for gaining the agency to direct our attention as a just and loving gaze, and through that practice, build the structures of our values with intention.