memes

I think this kind of thing is inevitable due to change blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness

You don't get hit with the change blindness because A: you're looking at the situation with fresh eyes instead of sleep deprived pre-coffee eyes that just want to get through the login screen to get some work done

And B, because you know how to interpret every bit of visual information on the screen and thus think of it as important. I mean, think of all the times you looked at someone else's computer and their desktop background was their kid or their dog. That's a huge change in visual terms, but it's a tiny change in terms of importance, so you dismiss it and get used to it immediately. You file it as unimportant and ignore it. Your filing of stuff is correct because you actually understand it. But an average user will file every single thing they don't understand as important, and also many things they do understand but don't care about.

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These messages all have varying levels of importance, but they all demand the user's attention in a way most people can't tell apart. The user is a bald monkey relying on stimulus-sorting firmware that's hundreds of thousands of years out of date. So the occipital lobe just files every one of those messages under the same label: noise.