Our Interruption Culture: what’s the answer?
The Culture of Interruption is pervasive throughout media in modern societies. What can we do about it? Some answers
Peter Hulm·
The Culture of Interruption is pervasive throughout media in modern societies. What can we do about it? Some answers
I can’t tell you precisely how much time I waste each day on passing over or deleting unnecessary emails to me, uninteresting news stories from my aggregators, Google search results and pointless YouTube videos, as well as trailer links for movies and TV series I don’t want to see. But it’s at least 2 hours.
For example, on 10 September, my Flipboard collection included:
I’m sure you, too, spend a lot of time eliminating such topics from your attention. My concern was how much time we are forced to waste through the new technologies, most blatantly with television – and what to do about it to rescue us from interruptions to our day.
That’s why I launched nusereal.com. Not because I thought it would tell internationalists what they needed to know immediately when something has happened that might be important in their world.
My primary aim was to enable UNers and NGO workers to check that the unending detritus of “news” hadn’t made them miss something essential. Hence its subtitle: “Your second place to come for international news.”
It seemed an obvious extension for Global-Genevans to my Ph.D. argument that we live in an Interruption Culture.
But that only relates to one section of my thesis, which was entitled “Atrocity, celebrity, deictics: a new heurethics for media”. Heurethics, by the way, was my term for ethics that requires invention (a development from my Florida-based teacher Gregory L. Ulmer’s heuretics).
MSN
You don’t need to bother with these ideas further unless you are interested in the complete thesis (PDF). My summary boasted: “This dissertation introduces a number of new terms into communications theory: language-event, the culture of interruption, the penumbra of the present, aporias of knowledge, terminality, bricollage, deictics and heurethics (among others). It also challenges a number of traditional conceptions within specific disciplines, particularly the political and social sciences, with regard to violence, justice, celebrity, and, of course, atrocity.”
I am still waiting for other academics to find them as obvious as they seemed to me.
But please don’t think I’m promoting myself as the Man with the Answers to the Interruption Culture. And I drew on some previously well-established (or widely criticized) theorists of contemporary culture in developing my jargon.
For example, Jean Baudrillard (for whom I was an assistant at the European Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies in Saas-Fee during one semester). Back in 1970 he argued that consumption today is essentially of signs (values/meanings) not goods. You might buy an Eames chair, but for its value as an indicator of your good taste, rather than its comfort compared to others – that was the kind of argument he made.
Much advertising, he said, seeks to exalt the sign at the expense of the actual product. “What characterizes the consumer society is the universality of fait divers (trivial-rated news) in mass communications. All political, historic, cultural information is received in the same anodine and miraculous form of the fait divers” (my translation, but see this).
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in fact an often overlooked reference The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).
We can also point to cinema studies professor Bill Nichols’ Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991). He notes: “Images of the collapse of the Twin Towers, the massacres at Srebrenica or the abuses at Abu Ghraib were presented iconically rather than informatively in news programmes and were not at all framed so as to satisfy any demand for knowledge. News reportage urges us to look but not care, see but not act, know but not change."
The Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh standing on the box with wires attached to his left and right hand, 4 November 2003
U.S. Army / Criminal Investigation Command (CID), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AbuGhraibAbuse-standing-on-box.jpg
The French theorist Guy Debord (1931-1994) dubbed the world he saw “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), which some thought was a catalyst for the 1968 demonstrations in Paris (LINK).
Using this perspective today, on TV we see Ukraine being bombed, but it’s covered briefly rather than extensively, as exemplars of what war can do rather than an examination of what is being done to civilians in the besieged regions.
Similarly, the Palestinians we see in Gaza are just part of a fait divers while the politics takes place elsewhere, often somewhere that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground. And just provides a quote for the evening news, so that we don’t have to dwell on the horrors.
The headline on one of my news monitors was: “Gen Z only watches TV through social clips. Hollywood is scrambling: viewers scroll instead of stream. Studios grapple with a new marketing dilemma: fight or join?” The technique is called clipping (LINK).
We’ve already become used to messages that include TLDR (too long, didn’t read). These days our notes can read TSDR (too short or silly, didn’t read) and TSSR (too short or simple, sorry I read) as well. The question for all these sources: why are you telling me this?
"Europeans Say These 23 Things Instantly Give Away That You're An American"
MSN
Examples from the past couple of days (I had at least to skim them, as the media moguls planned, but thank goodness for subheads):
https://www.wanderluststorytellers.com/travel-essentials-most-travelers-often-forget/
I know, it’s hard not to click on the links just to find out what makes the stories so bad.
1980s researchers found that a typical 30-minute news programme on commercial television in Australia could contain as little as 17 minutes of news once the title sequences, headlines, teasers for later items, advertisements, sport, weather and sign-offs were excluded.
That is, more than one-third (nearly 37%) of evening news consisted of obvious interruptions, exacerbating the already fragmentary nature of much news presentation through editing, cuts, and reaction shots.
One result: from the late 1990s on, holiday advertisements have often sold viewers the idea that vacations could free them from interruption. The writer Normal Mailer had already pointed out that ads offer solutions to social problems in 30-second bites.
spot the portable
Furthermore, ads rarely reference the programmes in which they appear or vice-versa, unless it is to take us away from the real events being covered (hair conditioner ads during cycle races, for example).
We have all grown used to news broadcasts’ emphasis on the now, leading to what cultural researchers have recognized as a “fragmentation of social process, evacuating history”. Peter Golding and Philip Elliott observed in 1979: “In a real sense reason disappears as actors flit across the journalistic stage, perform and hurriedly disappear. [...] Industrial relations appears not as an evolving conflict of interest but as a sporadic eruption of inexplicable anger and revolt. [...] Similarly, the political affairs of foreign lands appear as spasmodic convulsions of a more or less violent turn, while international relations appear to result from the occasional urge for travel and conversation indulged in by the diplomatic jet set.”
worth the trip?
Today this has become so standard it is hardly questioned, and the video-clip culture’s ascendance over television news has strengthened the tendency to ignore historic analysis in favour of the immediate. At the same time, the need for “analysts” who can provide interpretations of the fragments that flit across our screens, whether to comfort us or reinforce our encouraged prejudices, has replaced most in-depth reporting.
MeidasTouch examines current U.S. politics carefully in its videocasts but it often comes across as a personal rant. Medium seems to feature social commentary as shock-horror stories.
In this world, Substack’s serious examination of events read more like an academic lecture more than a political exploration of developments: we have mostly lost the habit of taking such language in our stride.
Fox News 21 September 2025
So it seems quite natural in political discourse for recently assassinated alt-right activist Charlie Kirk to have said: “Think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights."
And historian Heather Cox Richardson then reported, in the midst of much MAGA agitation against the Left: “In fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical” (LINK). Later revelations suggested Robinson may have in fact walked onto the wild side.
On 20 September CNN published a long article about all the misinformation, faked photos and distortions spread about the murder, correcting stories that had been disseminated days before (LINK).
One result of such contradictatorial hysteria has been identified by the Geneva-born English novelist (and Parisian university teacher) Christine Brooke-Rose in 1993: “Each of us is many; identity is wholly constructed and deconstructed by our world”.
The U.S. scholar Neil Postman, author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, documented similarly how technology changes language and meanings as well as lives. “The telegraph and the penny press changed what we once meant by ‘information.’ Television changes what we once meant by the terms ‘political debate,’ ‘news,’ and ‘public opinion.’ The computer changes ‘information’ once again. Writing changed what we once meant by ‘truth’ and ‘law’; printing changed them again, and now television and computer change them once more. [Technology] redefines ‘freedom,’ ‘truth,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘fact’, ‘wisdom,’ ‘memory,’ ‘history’ – all the words/ we live by).”
A former faculty member of the New York-based New School for Social Research, Founding Dean of the Media and Communications Division at EGS, Wolfgang Schirmacher, who pioneered the postmodern ideas of homo generator (the creative human, has noted the way in which media now frame so much of our seeing, thinking and the limits to our possibilities: “The telephone answering machine has changed our style of personal communication as lastingly as the computer changed the flow of writing. With the feature ‘call screening’ we are present and absent at the same time, becoming free and open to choose the ‘essential moment,’ as the Zen masters put it.”
But for many of us, embracing this offer of creative choice requires too much at one time, and so much media these days works against it.
Lying in state or lies by the state?
We were able to see how much of television’s fragmentation is deliberate, and how much is constructed or reconstructed for us when viewing broadcasts of the funeral of President Ronald Reagan on 11 June 2004. Much broadcast media that day described it as “a work of art” and an example of his mastery of timing.
Print media were much more critical on his death but that would have required consumers to spend more focused time on his abilities and performance.
Admittedly, 25 years earlier, print journalism had joined television in promulgating the myths of Reagan as a ‘Teflon’ President and Great Communicator. The major newspapers and magazines of the 1970s wrote of Reagan as widely supported when in fact he was “the least popular president in the post-World War II period,” according to two academics who took the time to look at the records. They recorded that he beat President Jimmy Carter in the ratings only in one year in office for his first time (year 3), though Carter was depicted as notoriously unpopular with voters.
In his first year, when the media were creating the laudatory titles, Reagan held fewer press conferences than any other president in 50 years, and received poor reviews for his “oratorical skills” for all five events. The researchers pointed out: “At no time in Reagan’s first years was the general public as charmed by Ronald Reagan as the news media.”
Since then, print and broadcast media have sharpened their sense of each other as cultural competitors, and the AI-fuelled Internet has recently joined the fray.
At the Reagan funeral it was easy to identify the surface aspects forefronted by the media: the ‘statesman’, world leader, popular President, creator of a decisive turning in history, supply-side politician, loving husband, victim of Alzheimer’s – discourses which could only be brought into agreement by excluding discussion of the ‘out-of-touch’ politician, dangerous risk-taking leader or ‘voodoo’ economist.
As Michael Arlen, the New Yorker’s television essayist in the 1970s, reminded us early on: “Virtually nothing created for the public is created either intuitively or innocently.” Newsweek wrote of Nancy Reagan at the funeral when she put her head on the coffin: “Her family gathered around her; in that moment, at least, she no longer seemed so alone.”
The family, of course, consisted of their two long-estranged children who had long criticized fiercely their parents’ unconcern with them, their father’s politics as well as the present Administration’s. Reagan’s son Ron told talk-show host Larry King he did not believe the funeral itself had much to do with his father but rather embodied the desire to stage an event at which people could ‘feel good’ about themselves (CNN transcript).
The key to all this was what I termed the penumbra of the present. The emphasis, on what was happening immediately, crowded out the longer-term considerations and judgements. We hear it often these days from “analysts”, whose main job for the mainstream broadcasting organizations seems to be to smooth over possible contradictions and enable viewers to feel they are being given the only possible answer, and to take comfort from that. As before: “Look but not care, see but not act, know but not change.”
The network of journalist friends who contribute to Global Geneva, such as editor Edward Girardet, Americas editor Bill Dowell and former AP reporter Mort Rosenblum, all provide backgrounding in their pieces about major news developments to explain their personal involvement in the issues, rather than offering simple overviews of what is happening. We hope that makes our articles different from the offerings of more commercial media.
It’s also the explanation, to me, of why articles often continue to get hits for three or four years after publication. They offer insights into political events that go beyond the current day’s headlines, and still have something insightful to offer long after the up-to-the-minute talking head has moved on to the next designated crisis.
On Jean Baudrillard: Understanding Trump’s Loyal Supporters in U.S. Politics
Christine Brooke-Rose: Geneva's Hidden Literary Gem
A long-time reporter, editor and information consultant for international organizations, Peter Hulm also has a M.A. in Mass Communications Research from Leicester University.