How Interrupt Frequency, Not Content, Breaks Human Sensemaking

This conjecture reframes the crisis of individual and Collective sensemaking as fundamentally a problem of interrupt frequency rather than information quality. Human Cognitive architecture evolved under conditions where attention-demanding signals numbered in the tens to low hundreds per day — a regime that agriculture barely altered. The digital attention economy, declared as such by Wired Magazine in the mid-1990s, has pushed daily interrupt counts up by orders of magnitude through notifications, dopamine-loop design, oxytocin-exploiting social signals, and algorithmic provocation engines. The hypothesis is that once a critical threshold is crossed — variable by individual neurology — information processing doesn't merely degrade; it becomes functionally dysfunctional.

The structural properties of digital media compound the problem. Digital encoding is inherently staccato: it samples, quantizes, and cuts. Platforms built on this substrate tend to maximize discrete hits rather than sustain continuity of attention. The Emergence of "the long read" as a marked category is itself diagnostic — sustained attention has become so rare it requires its own label. Meanwhile, the attention deficit disorder epidemic maps suspiciously well onto the timeline of digital media proliferation, suggesting it may be less a clinical pathology than an adaptive response to an environment engineered to interrupt and reprogram.

The intervention that follows from this analysis is not content moderation, media literacy, or algorithmic transparency — it is radical interrupt reduction. The most consequential tool imaginable would be a personal information agent governed by a single parameter: how many inbound signals does the user want per day? Set the number low, delegate curation to software, and restore the cognitive conditions under which human Sensemaking actually functions. This is worth more than any content policy architecture yet devised.