The logic of news imminences functions like a strobe light (that device that generates intermittent light, causing very curious optical illusions): what today occupies all the headlines may disappear tomorrow without anything really having changed. The Gaza conflict displaced that of Ukraine, the escalation with Iran repositioned the devastation of Gaza, a health crisis as striking and cinematic as that of hantavirus is irremediably covering up the Ormuz mess. Etcetera. The mechanism is not accidental. It responds to a media ecology based on competition for attention, a finite resource that is distributed according to criteria of emotional impact and novelty. Also of narrative saturation. When a topic stops generating surprise or no longer offers any immediate and appetizing dramatic twist, like that of the viral ship, it falls into the background even if its objective gravity is equal to or greater than others. A girl bites a dog and contracts rabies, but the next day Larry, the popular cat of Downing Street, scratches the leader of the British opposition and the case of the biting and rabid girl is forgotten all of a sudden. These are examples of insubstantial but well-seasoned events.This volatility creates an intermittent reality, where facts do not disappear from the world but from the narrative. Ukraine continues to be a conflict that totally conditions international relations, but its media presence fluctuates according to the irruption of other (supposed) emergencies. Gaza continues to suffer a horrible humanitarian crisis, but the coverage is diluted when another geopolitical focus erupts with more force. And so it goes. Public perception is therefore built on a regime of discontinuity, where importance does not depend so much on the magnitude of the event, but on its ability to impose itself in the incessant cycle of novelties through a non-logic of an emotional or even aesthetic character.The phenomenon is not new. During the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis completely overshadowed the Algerian War, even though the conflict accumulated hundreds of thousands of deaths. The 1994 Rwandan genocide (relative to the total population, one of the worst in history) was invisibilized because it coincided with the toughest moments of the Balkan War, a war closer and easier to codify culturally and emotionally. The 2010 Haiti earthquake disappeared from the headlines in a few weeks, replaced by the eruption of the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which affected European flights and, therefore, generated a more direct sense of urgency. Even 9/11 swiftly displaced the coverage of the 2001 Argentine crisis, which until then occupied a central space on the international agenda. It stopped being talked about, period. Since it did not fit the official apocalyptic narrative, not a single syllable was said about the behavior of world stock markets, which reacted with indifference to Bin Laden's attacks.
The machinery is always the same: current events are fed by narratives that must have narrative tension, attractive actors, and rather lurid scripts. When a conflict enters a phase of stalemate —even if it is a tragic stalemate— it loses informational value. Collective attention, therefore, functions like the spotlights of a circus that can only illuminate a very small number of rings at the same time, hence the need to use a good strobe light like those used in 1980s discotheques to stun the crowd. The result is a fragmented perception of the world, made up of peaks of hysterical intensity that, suddenly, erratically, lead to incomprehensible silences. This intermittency has political consequences: what is not seen does not exist in the public sphere, and what does not exist generates no pressure, no debate, no responsibilities, nor anything at all. Informational imminences act as centrifugal forces that expel relevant topics from the visual field, not because they cease to be important, but because they cease to be supposedly urgent. In the contemporary media regime, urgency —and, above all, "emergency— is the great excuse both for saying and for not saying. In fact, the conveniently theatricalized use of "emergencies" is creating episodes that may make our grandchildren chuckle. Stroboscopic reality is not a continuum, but a succession of windows that open and close randomly, according to criteria that have more to do with the psychology of attention than with the objective hierarchy of facts. And since we have become accustomed to it, it seems normal to us.
