Articles

Interruption and Latency: The Throbber Against the Fantasies of Real-time

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Abstract

In almost every type of experience mediated by digital interfaces – loading images and pages from the World Wide Web, updating social media feeds, streaming videos and multimedia content – we can find an animated icon that appears in a perpetual circular movement on itself, which is commonly referred to as the throbber. Unlike a progress bar, the state of processing progress is unknown. In other words, it is unknown when what we are waiting for will eventually arrive. We only know that something is being processed, loaded or downloaded behind the scenes of the interface, in the circuits of the black box that is beyond the screen. For a moment, we are hostage to a machinic temporality. The throbber corresponds, to use an idea from Friedrich Kittler (1986), to a surface effect, that is, to a way of ensuring entertainment – the production of a humanly symbolized reality – given the abstraction of the formal computing processes in the depth. In this sense, the throbber seeks to hide the discontinuities of the system so that, faced with interruption or delay, the users do not abandon the process, allowing their attention to be hypnotically sustained in a kind of media aesthetics of lag (Starosielski, 2015).

From a theoretical mapping of the throbber as media, we propose a particularisation of this element of digital culture, on the one hand, in relation to the cultural images of the notion of real-time associated with the development of cybernetics in the 1960s and, on the other, in relation to the fallacious nature of these images in what will be questioned from the idea of the throbber as an aesthetic zone of affect.

Keywords: Throbber, Interruption, Real-time, materialities of media, techno-fantasies

How to Cite:

Bogalheiro, M., (2025) “Interruption and Latency: The Throbber Against the Fantasies of Real-time”, communication +1 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/cpo.2070