concept
Engagement
Engagement names a metric that becomes a moral language. It becomes important whenever institutions need a neutral-seeming account of what audiences or users want. It helps preserve feedback and product learning, but can fail when response volume replaces judgments about importance, quality, or civic consequence. In When Incentives Become the Moral Language, engagement marks the domain where connection aims survive while platforms learn to say users engage with this content instead of we think this content is valuable—behavioral data looks neutral because it describes user actions rather than editorial preference. It differs from attention because attention names the scarce capacity itself; engagement names the scored response that capacity produces.
