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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

In the prehistoric era (and continuing into the present day), all that's required to interrupt someone is a set of vocal chords you can use to talk to them, or a finger you can use to tap them on the shoulder, or a fist you can use to knock on their door. The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.

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I'm pretty sure that if the phone system didn't exist, no one from a call center in South Asia would have ever come all the way to rural Canada to try to tell me I have a computer virus that they can fix for a few hundred dollars.

Maybe not exactly that, but traveling salesmen (snake oil, encyclopedias) used to be more of a thing.

You also have to by physically near them.

> The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.

Yes it is... physical space is shaped to keep most people from being able to interrupt you. Being able to call anyone around the world changed that.

What common physical space keeps people from interrupting you?

- I had my own room as a kid. My parents and brother banged on the door whenever they pleased.

- I worked at a tech company, had my own desk, and wore headphones. Coworkers still sent me Slack messages and tapped me on my shoulder.

- I've lived in a home in the burbs. People came to my home and rang the bell.

None of them were hard for the interruptor to do, and all of them happened frequently. In fact, I would argue that they are more frequent than the number of phone calls I get nowadays, which are actually easy much easier to screen/ignore than any of the above interruptions.

I think their point is in physical space, dozens to maybe thousands of people (if there's a lot of people around you, I guess?) can easily interrupt you at any given moment. With phones and things like Slack, hypothetically anyone near a phone can interrupt you if you're near your phone. Which people usually keep near them.

I would say depending on how bad someone has it they could get 1 to 3 spam calls a day, I assume if someone was getting consistently more than that they'd use a screener to lower it. That's a significant amount.

In all of the places named above, people have interrupted me more than once a day, and I don't think that's abnormal. And again, it's much easier and less rude to put my phone on silent for unknown numbers, than it is to ignore a coworker/friend/neighbor/partner/child who's trying to get my attention, or even a stranger at my door.

I'm not here defending spam calls. They are annoying AF.

Nor do I disagree that hypothetically more people on Earth have access to us than ever before. Of course they do.

Nor do I find being interrupted pleasant. I personally find it very annoying, even when it's a loved one.

I'm just making the point that this idea of world where people weren't easy to interrupt never existed.

All of the same people who could interrupt you before still can, in all the same ways. In addition, people can call you and interrupt you that way, too.

I am not saying people couldn’t interrupt before, there are simply more ways for more people to interrupt you than ever before.

On the contrary, due to devices like phones and the internet, I have a smaller number of interruptive people in my immediate vicinity than I probably would have decades or centuries ago. Friends and loved ones feel more comfortable moving away, it's become more of a norm, bc it's easier than ever to keep in touch over long distances, and so they don't knock on my door, because they don't even live in my city. And on the flip side, I find myself surrounded by lots of strangers who don't know me, and so don't knock on my door or stop me on the street either.

I'm trying to change this, however, and make a lot more local friends. Despite the higher potential for being interrupted.

Technology reducing distance kinda changes the game though.

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