After Alerts

This article considers the silencing of smartphones to trace a shift from a culture of distraction to one characterized by pervasive interruption. Specifically, we interpret the silencing of phones—once symptomatic of diversionary pings that targeted an attentive user—as signaling an internalization of the sonic ecology of their alerts. This shift manifests in a relentless bureaucratic friction in the digital ecosystems of which we are (unavoidably) a part, one that puts interruptive focus to work in an extractive register.