Breaking news! Again.
In low-level, embedded software, we use a concept called an interrupt.
An interrupt is either a hardware or software signal to the processor to stop what it’s doing right now and handle something else. Interrupts give us important functionality such as event, time-critical, priority, and CPU-sharing functionality.
What happens when you touch the screen of your sleeping iPhone? The screen hardware sends an interrupt signal to the processor. That signal wakes it up, and then it runs code to figure out what happened, and that code turns on the screen.
Each time the process gets an interrupt, it must switch context. Stop what it’s doing, save off the current state of everything into memory, and then start working on the new stuff. When the new stuff’s done, then restore all of the previous context from memory.
It takes time and resources.
News outlets, social media companies, and influencers use interrupts on us. They make money on our attention, so they play the lowest common denominator game. Urgency. Importance. Fear. FOMO.
That little buzz. The banner. The voice inflection.
All interrupts to your brain. You have no choice but to run a little routine every time that interrupt happens.
None of this is new. Newspapers were the (first offenders)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism].
But AI ramps it up exponentially.
Only you can break the cycle.
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