On: Interrupting

Interrupting - We’re becoming a nation of interrupters and interruptions. It’s starting to drive me a little batty.

Television is the worst offender. Scary thing is that television is such a trendsetter and we, the sheep, follow blindly along. Television is built on interruptions – the commercial. We’re sailing along through a good story or a great game and suddenly (often designed to come at the best part of the story) whammo, we’re interrupted out of our reverie with a commercial. We’ve learned to live with this over the years – it being the commercial that enabled free television, but then along came cable and TV wasn’t free anymore. Money wins. But as I’ve said, we’ve learned to live with it.

Now, however, they’ve decided that they have the right to take over a quarter to a third of our screen during the regular program and make their announcements, doing whatever silly thing they can think of to grab our attention graphically and sonically.

Mark my word, soon we’ll see product commercials in these spots as well. Why do we stand for this kind of interruption? It’s just going to get worse and worse and we all know it.

Tune in to just about any news talk show now and it’s just ridiculous. No one can finish a sentence. It started with the hosts who in their overwhelming egos would not let their guests finish. I can just imagine some lightweight producer saying, “Oh, I like this style. It makes for such good, fast television. It’s like reality news – just the way people talk.” What it is is just a bunch of people pushing to get heard.

Interrupting stimulates frustration which creates anger which results in fighting. This is what these people seem to be doing all the time now. Whatever happened to the rules of debate? Whoever said it was a good idea to not let an expert guest make his point?

We, as a society, are losing our ability to listen – to listen to one another. Interrupting is the classic result of that. Break it down. People who interrupt are people who have stopped listening and feel that what they have to say in the moment is more important than the person who is talking. This is the ultimate breakdown in communication. This is anti-communication.

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