After Alerts

It is a truism that, at least in North America, anyone born after 1995 keeps their phone on silent. As a result, the age of constant sonic distractions by cellphones is on the wane. How then to characterize our new sonic ecology? How do we listen to the silence of phones, and what do we learn about our present attentional economy from doing so? An alert, after all, does what it does to call our attention to the fore. But to listen to these alerts is to supplement the autonomic responses that they individually elicit with an attention to the conditions and suppositions that such responses entail—affectively, subjectively, and socially. This remains the case in their contemporary silence.

In this speculative paper, we argue that such listening reveals that silenced phones don’t make sonic space for concentration, but instead signal a larger attentional shift from a culture of distraction to one of interruption. If distraction entailed the pleasure of indulgent excursions, today’s online experiences are peppered with the banality of something different: myriad interruptions taking the specific forms of pop-ups, 2fa, click-throughs, sign-ups, cookie consent banners, and the like. Seemingly simple online actions —say, making a dinner reservation—require surmounting a stack of small prerequisite interactions that stand in the way of the task at hand and the smooth sailing of what once was surfing. While perniciously extractive, these interruptions also incite a qualitative shift in contemporary technoculture. That is, what it means and feels like to be alone and together is changed by virtue of this newly prominent interruptive affect.