Importantly, witnessing tragic events is not just about seeing. It is a process of encountering information, reckoning with it cognitively and emotionally, and then deciding how to respond. As the philosopher Kelly Oliver argues in Witnessing (2001), response is fundamental to witnessing, whether it ultimately involves speaking, writing, donating, organising or simply carrying what one has seen in a way that influences how one moves through the world. To be able to do this, those who witness must be able to acquire the necessary information without becoming overwhelmed, and then have the time and space to make sense of it.

Social media short-circuits this process. The volume and immediacy of content make it difficult to fully absorb any single event before the next one arrives. The psychologist Paul Slovic has highlighted that humans are simply not well equipped to care about large numbers of people simultaneously, not because we are naturally indifferent, but because we lack meaningful ways to comprehend suffering at that scale, let alone to directly intervene. As Slovic put it: ‘The more who die, the less we care.’ His point predates the current social media era, but the constant parallel streams of crises make that response even harder to avoid: the sense of futility compounds with every new tragedy that appears.

Sustainable witnessing means recognising what can be meaningfully held, understood and acted upon, within our actual cognitive and emotional limits – and allowing the rest to pass without guilt. It is about choosing depth over breadth, and intention over pressure. We can make an analogy to food consumption: in societies with abundant access to calorie-dense foods, people cannot consume limitlessly without it becoming harmful. Can we practise consuming emotionally challenging content online without getting sick? As with food consumption, the problem may not be so much the abundance of information, but the absence of an adequate framework for managing our intake.

[…]When attention isn’t fragmented across countless crises, it is more possible to move from reaction to understanding, and from understanding to sustained forms of response. This may begin with a question: what can I meaningfully contribute, and where might my efforts take a tangible form? For some of us, working in fields like education or in civil society, the answer lies within our everyday work. For others, it might take the form of volunteering on days off, supporting a specific political initiative that aligns with one’s values, or showing up where needed in other ways – concrete actions that will likely provide a more durable sense of contribution than online reaction alone ever could.