Were the critics wrong? It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger. It’s not far off from picking up a hitchhiker. Maybe it’s impossible to separate cause from consequence, but it’s hard not to see personal headphones as part of our alienation from one another.
People in cities have a need to distance themselves. It's not a village where you can know everyone. We have a strong innate need to limit our social circles.
Before the walkman there was the newspaper as a tool for isolation. Besides, who says it is desirable that a stranger can strike up a conversation with me at any time?
The people that want this are overhelmingly living in villages anyway where they can do their thing.
The early criticism was overblown, but I think there is a slow, gradual degradation of social values when ubiquitous technology allows people to disengage easily.
I remember being annoyed when a coworker had AirPods on constantly, even when conversing with other people. Obviously we could have a conversation, but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).
In the early days when everyone was starting to get smartphones, there were lots of memes about people staring at their phones constantly and maybe walking into traffic or bumping into people. Constant smartphone use has been normalized now (for better or worse). In the early days, people felt bad when they pulled out their phone to look something up during a conversation, but that behavior is no longer looked down on. It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.
Yeah, I think you're right. I didn't phrase it quite right.
Arbitrarily scrolling in mid-conversation is rude, but somebody picking up their phone to look something up or read a text message now happens without a big fuss, whereas before, I think people were more likely to apologize for the action. It's acceptable to just pick up your phone now to look up something or check your messages during a conversation in a lull.
On the other hand, I see couples seated together in restaurants just scrolling their phones privately at the same table, so generally it seems like it's more "okay" to disengage to your technology.
>but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give
I still feel like this.
>It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.
And I do not agree about this either. Also, I think most of the people I spend my time with would also agree. But perhaps I'm (unfortunately) an outlier.
The part about the airpods is something that is going to change very soon: now that they are officially approved as hearing aids, asking someone to remove them, or even creating the expectation that one does will get you into Ada territory.
Not putting headphones down or just scrolling during conversation is considered rude around me. It is ok to scroll to find info about something you discuss, it is ok to scroll when not conversing during longer trip etc ... but it is not ok to just take phone out mid conversation and scroll a bit.
Obviously we could have a conversation, it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).
This says more about you than them. What was the point? To have a conversation or to get your coworker to behave a certain way? You're annoyed at arbitrary aesthetics, as if this person didn't show enough deference to your preferences, even though you were sure they turned off their music and you were able to have a conversation.
Avoiding "conversations" with strangers is exactly why I wear them. (Putting conversations into quotes here because it's almost always people who want to hold a monolog on their favorite topic)
Yes, I also agree with the dead reply here, I also use my headphones to avoid beggars and street fundraisers. They are incredibly persistent here. Sometimes they even block my path. Which risks causing me getting physical of course, I don't mean violent but I would push them aside if they don't let me pass. And the fundraisers are no longer happy with a couple bucks (they could just carry a payment terminal), no you have to give all your personal details and sign up for a recurring support plan. No way I will ever do that.
And the beggars, I really don't carry money anymore.
But having headphones in really helps avoid these people. I can see them looking at me, seeing my headphones and subconsciously eliminating me from their list of targets.
I'm not even really into music but I usually listen to nature sounds and have the noise cancelling on full blast. It also helps reduce stress and fatigue from overly loud city noises like big diesel buses, assholes that have to honk constantly when traffic is stuck, etc. I still hear them of course but it doesn't feel that heavy.
I think most humans make a difference between wanted and unwanted contact. It is the difference between rape and love making. Between letters between friends and spam. And so on.
What's much more likely is that you and I are thinking of different scenarios. I'm not thinking about your average hellos, thank-yous, good-mornings, questions, requests for assistance, short remarks, et cetera. Few people would find those objectionable, and neither do I.
But the person monologuing about a singular uninteresting topic is so universally disliked that comedians have for decades been joking about sitting next to them on the plane. Or the salesman, questionnaire filler, petition peddler, or beggar trying to get something from you. I have yet to find anyone who likes those people. And then there's the chatterbox who just. won't. stop. talking. I think you can fill books with the number of articles written about dealing with them.
The problem with all those people is that they are hard to get rid of once you allow even a little bit. It's far easier to not let it get started in the first place. Headphones are a popular way to prevent that. You can even see it mentioned as a strategy in this thread.
Anyway, those people are imposing themselves. Loads of people dislike that, and so do I. These people are either out to get something from you, or are using you as an audience for their own stuff.
You are the best example of a self-centered homo sapiens.
Why not spending time with people you dont even know?
I met a lot of people and listend to very usable things for my life.
It's funny. You call me self-centered, yet you feel that you have the right to impose your life story on others.
But sure, I'll admit to writing in an abrasive style. So I'll rephrase.
"This is a good thing. It clearly signals to others that I have no value to bring to a conversation with a random person. Might I suggest you read a book on a topic you find exhilarating? It will be infinitely more rewarding than any conversation with me will be for you."
There's a lot more immigration and diversity today, especially in urban and sub-urban America. While laudatory in many respects, I think it also reduces social interaction because there's less shared cultural background, beliefs, or even language that might otherwise have lubricated these interactions.
But why do you desire to communicate with literally everyone in a big city? I don't care about that.
The reason I live in a big city is that it has enough of a base to make even small fringey communities viable. Such as the makerspace I'm part of, and some more NSFW activities too. I'm sure 95% of people don't care about those things but for me they are very defining.
Only if you think of the other person as lesser than you or you are fearful of the interaction.
Traveling abroad and being a tourist, usually invites tons of conversation and sharing of culture from both sides, especially if the person visiting has put in effort to learn the language.
Lots of people don't want to talk to strangers. It is socially unacceptable to wear a T-shirt saying "please don't talk to me" - but headphones are socially acceptable.
And yet still, plenty of women report persistent men telling them to remove their headphones so they can engage in unwanted conversation.
The alienation was already there; the headphone just made it more acceptable to signal.
There will always be some people who don't want to talk to strangers, but how much of what we experience is due to social conditioning?
As for women who don't want to be approached, harassment is an entirely different issue. Just because talking to strangers and harassing women were more acceptable in the past doesn't mean that one follows from the other.
> As for women who don't want to be approached, harassment is an entirely different issue. Just because talking to strangers and harassing women were more acceptable in the past doesn't mean that one follows from the other.
Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment. They all make the recipient uncomfortable, and others should be able to identify and respect anti-openness signaling like wearing earbuds or not sustaining eye contact.
> I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me.
Well, I absolutely 100% consider these types harrassing yes. The indicative parts is that they are 100% selfish in their reasons to contact (the jehovah's want to make themselves feel good by spreading their religion, the sellers want income). There's zero in it for me, there is zero consideration for me. I'm just a target for their gratification.
And they have no interest in my objections. I don't even open the door anymore to people I don't know because it's always bad news.
There are strangers I would like to talk to. It is just that most strangers are not someone I would like to talk to - if I wanted to talk to somebody I could just remove my airpods.
This isn't part of the social conditioning, it is because most people are not very interesting.
But it creates social problems when people aren't talking among opposed "parties". That's why we now have social isolation and radicalization issues across the world.
I think scale is the issue here. Our communities got too big and too virtual. In an intimate village, no one has the privilege to say "well I just don't want to interact with anyone outside" - this is uncompromising. Our society, via scale, affords you the ability to not be a part of. It's very self-reinforcing because the larger and robust you make the society, the more people want to secure privacy. The argument that a species that evolved and survived largely in part due to being highly social would suddenly seek privacy indicates something else is wrong in the environment imho (and it's really not hard to do evidence discovery here at all, you can find them via observation or following the money).
It created a brand-new concept of private listening, I think. Music listening must have been a communal thing up until then mostly (I'm counting record players in this, so we'd need to go further back before the 20th century to consider what I'm saying). It does follow that the more we allow you to do by yourself, the more you won't do with others. Take eating by yourself for example. I can't imagine that being a common thing before our time. Tech is really putting us into a spaceship. Your little dwelling is just a ship with a terminal, and you can definitely slap on some headphones and put a screen in front of you and basically float through space in your spaceship until the day you die.
We can probably measure the impact this is having culturally specifically in non-western cultures, because their baseline is not as anti-social compared to the west.
I think it's also worth noting that many are not going to read this article and go "hah, they got it totally wrong". They didn't. Mass scale human behavioral change has the been the story for a while now.
> The sudden rise of headphone wearing pedestrians - spurred by Sony’s lightweight headsets (17% the weight of others)
Funny to see this trend has completely reversed. People wear more and more huge behemoths of headphones again. Not that I mind that but I find it an interesting development.
The article also goes on about beepers/pagers. I didn't know these were also demonised. I really miss mine in fact, it was great to be reachable while not constantly sending my location to 2000 "trusted partners". Unfortunately here in Spain there is no longer even a single pager network in operation.
A dumbphone only gets part of the way, as the operator still knows pretty well where I'm hanging out. As does the government.
FWIW, I see far more people wearing earbuds out in public than wearing over-the-ear headphones. Grand View Research reports that earbuds outsell headphones by a wide margin (https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/earphone...) - this is in the U.S. though; Spain may differ.
> The market for earphones accounted for around 90% of the overall share in 2022 and is anticipated to witness a CAGR of 13.2 % from 2023 to 2030
True but the over the head ones I see are the big expensive ones, that's what I meant. Where once the weight and size of the headphones contributed to the adoption of the walkman, it seems to be not so much an issue anymore.
> ...nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music...
I have no desire to go back to that. New music is being created WORLDWIDE constantly and we also have a few hundred years of already-made music. There's no way I could even come close to 'owning' all of the music I'd want to own.
Discovering good new music is a problem becasuse there's so much of it. Since '99 I've been listening to one of the first streaming internet station. DJs give them one to two hour sets that go into rotation. There's no limit to the variety - you'll get an hour of Portuguese Fado music (was a fad in L.A. for awhile) followed by 8-bit video game music then Iranian music... I like it because it's curated by humans and not computer.
The good old days sucked. I have a large collection of CDs that I "own" and they're in a box in the basement because the medium is irrelevant.
For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.
I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78. And some of that stuff has an EXACT AND PRECISE 0.00% of having ever been carried in a physical shop on physical media such as: a DJ set consisting mainly of remixes of The Hacker tracks from the late 90s, recorded by a Canadian DJ in a Frankfurt Studio in 2025.
We're eating perfectly-prepared filet every day and people are reminiscing about school cafeteria salisbury steak.
> For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.
> I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78.
Counterpoint: I haven't bought a record in over 10 years. That is, I have added exactly zero full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2014. Even though I stopped spending money, I didn't have to stop (legally) listening.
If your numbers are correct, this (being able to play the music that I've listened to over the last 10 years) is something would have cost me over $1500.
They didn’t suck. Like many situations that were resource constrained they had unique positive attributes even though you have a strong preference for the alternative strictly speaking.
Sometimes being constrained forces you to have a different and better experience, like when you’re young and broke and have adventures, or there’s a power outage and the city turns into a party, or when you miss the bus and have an interesting walk.
I was and am a musician and massive music fan. I miss the experience of being on a long train trip with only 10 CDs and really deeply connecting to each of them with no distractions. I miss discovering something on a record store clerk’s recommendation. And it’s not fair to say I just miss being younger those were specific experiences and they were pleasant.
I’m not saying I’m going back, or that we all should. I am happy with unlimited access to everything that’s also great. But back then it didn’t suck, it was great in a different way.
Honestly it was better before, in france most of pop songs are utter s*t now, it used to be a blend of various degrees, from laughable dumpster fire to nice to great timeless pop music (goldman, cabrel, balavoine). You could say the same about brit pop, I still dig the police, dire straits, in ways that surprise me even today. There really was, afaik, a higher base floor.
the musicians making it know this deep down. it's like the music is there, and the musician who "made" it indeed only brought it from "there" to here. that is it.
at most you own the medium in which the music's representation is stored, which is streaming's problem. the medium is your internet connection if anything
I am a musician and I don’t know this at all, in fact I think sociopathic Silcon Valley assholes have created so much human misery and exploitation that it’s time to consider killing and eating them.
Or maybe we should just help ourselves to whatever it is you consider valuable.
I find it impossible to determine the value of my own work.
the saturation of content makes me regard the work of uploading my own 'done' work into a cloud provider (so that anybody can stream my music for free) as not worth the kick I would get from meaningless metrics determined by the same cloud platform into which I would upload my stuff if I did which I won't as it's worthless to do.
> Discovering good new music is a problem becasuse there's so much of it
Not really, discovering it is a problem because it is hidden. Current algorithms are designed to revert you to the same old and to show you stuff similar to what you have seen. You need to know specific terms to find something new - but of course if it is truly new for you, you do not know those terms.
Articles like this read a bit like the tech equivalent of "The climate has always changed". Yes, sure, new technologies have always spurred anxieties and moral panic - they also usually had some real impact on the social fabric. But the question is what kind of impact, and if the impact of current technologies is really the same as in the past.
> Yes, sure, new technologies have always spurred anxieties and moral panic
Have they though? Because scanning those headlines I get a vivid image in my head of newspapermen salivating at the chance to fabricate a moral panic out of thin air.
Thing 1: Everyone staring into their smartphones, nobody conversing at all. In many context where in the past, people would have started conversations out of sheer boredom, but made social connections that way.
Thing 2: A good 50% (and growing) people on sidewalks, bike paths etc. are completely oblivious to auditory stimuli such as callouts like "may I pass please" or bike bells or, for that matter, cars! Inevitably they have Airpods-style earphones in. With advanced environmental noise cancellation. At least the foam pad on-ear headphones of the Walkman era let other sounds through.
Oh, nostalgia! Now everyone is wearing wireless earbuds, even while riding a bike. And in greater numbers than I ever saw Walkman headphones. And yet humanity has somehow survived.
Wearing headphones while driving is illegal in most places, as it should be. I personally think people biking while wearing headphones are unwise but at least they’re unlikely to hurt someone else while doing it.
I think the point is that you can buy a road legal vehicle where the driver is entirely encased in glass/steal with anywhere from 5-30 powered speakers to use at any volume they want but we still end up having these "people existing outside with headphones is bad because every piece of the earth has been handed to cars" arguments.
In most US states there are no restrictions to driving with headphones on. By my quick count only six states ban it, and a handful more say you have to have one ear uncovered.
Sadly it is in France, although not because driving while not being able to hear is bad (otherwise car radios would be banned), but because they wanted to ban it for cyclists and motorbikes.
> And deaf people shouldn't be allowed to do either?
That's a poor comparison, for a few reasons.
1. Headphones can prevent you from responding to outside sounds in at least two ways: (1) the sound from the headphones might mask the outside sound so it is not audible to you, and (2) you might be distracted enough by the sound from the headphones that even if the outside sound is audible through the headphones you fail to notice it. Also that distraction can also take your attention away from other important things needed for safe driving.
Deafness only prevents you from responding to outside sounds by making it so you don't hear them. It does not add distractions on top of that.
2. Deafness is a disability. We often relax rules for people with disabilities to help them have a more ordinary life.
In the US less than 2 percent of the population is deaf. Letting that small number of people drive despite not being able to hear provides them with great benefit. It probably does slightly increase the overall accident rate but with it only being 2 percent or less of drivers the effect is limited.
People with headphones appears to be way higher than 2 percent. They will have a much bigger impact the 2 percent who are deaf.
3. Deaf people have likely been deaf for most or all of their lives. I'd expect they have learned to compensate by paying more attention visually to their surroundings. When they learned to drive they were likely taught the importance of such compensation and have been practicing and perfecting it ever since.
Headphones are temporary. Very few people wearing headphones while driving are going to have the compensation skills that deaf people have for dealing with not hearing outside sounds.
> 1. Headphones can prevent you from responding to outside sounds in at least two ways: (1) the sound from the headphones might mask the outside sound so it is not audible to you, and (2) you might be distracted enough by the sound from the headphones that even if the outside sound is audible through the headphones you fail to notice it. Also that distraction can also take your attention away from other important things needed for safe driving.
Cars have come with radios for nearly a century, tape players for 50+ years, and many drivers play their music so loud you can hear it even when sitting in another car
Clearly depriving or overloading auditory input is not deemed to be a risk
>Now everyone is wearing wireless earbuds, even while riding a bike.
Wind in the ears can be a problem. Blocking the wind helps people hear cars/ dangers better, provided the music is off/ very low volume. I, and several other cyclists i know wear buds (no music) for this reason.
You can't always tell if people are listening to music, or not.
With walkman headphones, i always remember being able to hear the high frequencies of other people's music.
The mobile phone holds way more functions.
Back then, you have listend to your favorite album.
No distraction, no incoming messages, nobody called.
Today, you get distracted while listening to one single song, mom calls, other waiting you fill their lonely life and so on.
Together with social media that thing will make the dumb dumber.
> Some said it was a sign of a continued rise of Reagan and Thatcher style individualism. Cultural critic Allan Bloom deemed the Walkman "a nonstop... masturbational fantasy” in his 1987 book ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ Neo-Luddite John Zerzan saw the Walkman as part of a modern trend that encouraged a "protective sort of withdrawal from social connections" and Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug "soma," from Huxley's Brave New World, creating, as he put it, "an airtight bubble of sound" that was nothing but a "sensory depressant." In other words it all felt ‘a bit blackmirror’ as one might say today. (A collection of quotes collected in this 1999 Reason Magazine article)
not sure about the masturbational fantasy but the rest seems fairly spot on as a critique?
The value proposition for the portable cassette deck, as opposed to the transistor radio, was an ad-free experience and content that was chosen by the user, rather than pushed by an algorithm (aka the DJ/station director/promoter/advertising sponsors/payola.)
Funnily enough, I still mostly just listen to the radio, especially in my car. I turn it on, done. No selecting tracks or streams, no fiddling with aux cords, bluetooth, it's just the easiest thing.
I had a walkman in the early 1980s, and really didn't end up using it that much, for similar reasons. They ate batteries, a cassette tape would run for about 20-30 minutes before you had to turn it over, so one tape got repetitive pretty quickly, and carrying more than a few tapes became inconvenient if you were out and about.
I later got a walkman-like device that was just a radio, which was much lighter and more practical if I was out on a long walk or run.
> Oscar Gross was preparing to take the case all the way to the supreme court, but backed out after someone was killed crossing the street while wearing headphones. The kind of tragic anecdote that is the inevitable and unavoidable price of freedom.
If the people of the 80s could only have imagined zombies walking around staring at their walkman. Their poor heads would have exploded with the first stories of people walking into poles, open man holes, etc.
We used to care so much about people, now we don’t care if they’re hit by a bus, unless showing that we care gives us some kind of benefit. Transactional empathy.
Did we? People in our tribe perhaps. Others not so much. There have been some golden eras of high trust societies, though usually only among homogenous populations.
So the less we see of ourselves in others, the less we give a shit about them? Makes sense, is this is why forced diversity initiatives have created so much controversy?
This reminds me of the story of the young man who was walking to get his mail when a helicopter fell out of the sky and killed him. Articles immediately blamed him for listening to his iPod, as if regular people know the subtle (?) sounds of a failing helicopter overhead.
People's rush to blame the victim never ceases to amaze me. I think that people see that the victim did X, and they don't do X, therefore they'll never suffer a similar fate, and they need to proudly proclaim it to the world. Maybe it's related to magical thinking and the just world fallacy.
The reality of random, unavoidable death is one of the most terrifying aspects of the world. So coming up with reasons for the death, or ways to avoid it helps people cope with the existential dread that they too could die randomly one day through no fault of their own.
Thank you for the excellent example of victim-blaming. Tell me, what does a failing helicopter falling out of the sky sound like? I need to know what I'm supposed to be listening for.
Were the critics wrong? It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger. It’s not far off from picking up a hitchhiker. Maybe it’s impossible to separate cause from consequence, but it’s hard not to see personal headphones as part of our alienation from one another.
People in cities have a need to distance themselves. It's not a village where you can know everyone. We have a strong innate need to limit our social circles.
Before the walkman there was the newspaper as a tool for isolation. Besides, who says it is desirable that a stranger can strike up a conversation with me at any time?
The people that want this are overhelmingly living in villages anyway where they can do their thing.
The early criticism was overblown, but I think there is a slow, gradual degradation of social values when ubiquitous technology allows people to disengage easily.
I remember being annoyed when a coworker had AirPods on constantly, even when conversing with other people. Obviously we could have a conversation, but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).
In the early days when everyone was starting to get smartphones, there were lots of memes about people staring at their phones constantly and maybe walking into traffic or bumping into people. Constant smartphone use has been normalized now (for better or worse). In the early days, people felt bad when they pulled out their phone to look something up during a conversation, but that behavior is no longer looked down on. It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.
>It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.
This feels incredibly rude, and I honestly don’t know anyone who would not consider this rude.
Yeah, I think you're right. I didn't phrase it quite right.
Arbitrarily scrolling in mid-conversation is rude, but somebody picking up their phone to look something up or read a text message now happens without a big fuss, whereas before, I think people were more likely to apologize for the action. It's acceptable to just pick up your phone now to look up something or check your messages during a conversation in a lull.
On the other hand, I see couples seated together in restaurants just scrolling their phones privately at the same table, so generally it seems like it's more "okay" to disengage to your technology.
>but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give
I still feel like this.
>It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.
And I do not agree about this either. Also, I think most of the people I spend my time with would also agree. But perhaps I'm (unfortunately) an outlier.
The part about the airpods is something that is going to change very soon: now that they are officially approved as hearing aids, asking someone to remove them, or even creating the expectation that one does will get you into Ada territory.
Not putting headphones down or just scrolling during conversation is considered rude around me. It is ok to scroll to find info about something you discuss, it is ok to scroll when not conversing during longer trip etc ... but it is not ok to just take phone out mid conversation and scroll a bit.
Obviously we could have a conversation, it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).
This says more about you than them. What was the point? To have a conversation or to get your coworker to behave a certain way? You're annoyed at arbitrary aesthetics, as if this person didn't show enough deference to your preferences, even though you were sure they turned off their music and you were able to have a conversation.
> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger
from my experience, strangers who start a conversation with you in public always want something, usually money
Avoiding "conversations" with strangers is exactly why I wear them. (Putting conversations into quotes here because it's almost always people who want to hold a monolog on their favorite topic)
Yes, I also agree with the dead reply here, I also use my headphones to avoid beggars and street fundraisers. They are incredibly persistent here. Sometimes they even block my path. Which risks causing me getting physical of course, I don't mean violent but I would push them aside if they don't let me pass. And the fundraisers are no longer happy with a couple bucks (they could just carry a payment terminal), no you have to give all your personal details and sign up for a recurring support plan. No way I will ever do that.
And the beggars, I really don't carry money anymore.
But having headphones in really helps avoid these people. I can see them looking at me, seeing my headphones and subconsciously eliminating me from their list of targets.
I'm not even really into music but I usually listen to nature sounds and have the noise cancelling on full blast. It also helps reduce stress and fatigue from overly loud city noises like big diesel buses, assholes that have to honk constantly when traffic is stuck, etc. I still hear them of course but it doesn't feel that heavy.
[dead]
> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger.
Good. I'm not your personal entertainment machine. Bring a book if you get bored.
An object lesson in civility in 2 comments.
Why is it "civil" to impose yourself on others and "uncivil" to let others be?
Most humans do not think of engaging with another human as an imposition.
I think most humans make a difference between wanted and unwanted contact. It is the difference between rape and love making. Between letters between friends and spam. And so on.
Don't be silly. Yes they do.
What's much more likely is that you and I are thinking of different scenarios. I'm not thinking about your average hellos, thank-yous, good-mornings, questions, requests for assistance, short remarks, et cetera. Few people would find those objectionable, and neither do I.
But the person monologuing about a singular uninteresting topic is so universally disliked that comedians have for decades been joking about sitting next to them on the plane. Or the salesman, questionnaire filler, petition peddler, or beggar trying to get something from you. I have yet to find anyone who likes those people. And then there's the chatterbox who just. won't. stop. talking. I think you can fill books with the number of articles written about dealing with them.
The problem with all those people is that they are hard to get rid of once you allow even a little bit. It's far easier to not let it get started in the first place. Headphones are a popular way to prevent that. You can even see it mentioned as a strategy in this thread.
Anyway, those people are imposing themselves. Loads of people dislike that, and so do I. These people are either out to get something from you, or are using you as an audience for their own stuff.
Yes, 100%. And cities are full of such people because they thrive in a space with lots of potential subjects.
You are the best example of a self-centered homo sapiens. Why not spending time with people you dont even know? I met a lot of people and listend to very usable things for my life.
It's funny. You call me self-centered, yet you feel that you have the right to impose your life story on others.
But sure, I'll admit to writing in an abrasive style. So I'll rephrase.
"This is a good thing. It clearly signals to others that I have no value to bring to a conversation with a random person. Might I suggest you read a book on a topic you find exhilarating? It will be infinitely more rewarding than any conversation with me will be for you."
Happy now?
There's a lot more immigration and diversity today, especially in urban and sub-urban America. While laudatory in many respects, I think it also reduces social interaction because there's less shared cultural background, beliefs, or even language that might otherwise have lubricated these interactions.
I'm just being descriptive here, not normative.
But why do you desire to communicate with literally everyone in a big city? I don't care about that.
The reason I live in a big city is that it has enough of a base to make even small fringey communities viable. Such as the makerspace I'm part of, and some more NSFW activities too. I'm sure 95% of people don't care about those things but for me they are very defining.
Only if you think of the other person as lesser than you or you are fearful of the interaction.
Traveling abroad and being a tourist, usually invites tons of conversation and sharing of culture from both sides, especially if the person visiting has put in effort to learn the language.
Lots of people don't want to talk to strangers. It is socially unacceptable to wear a T-shirt saying "please don't talk to me" - but headphones are socially acceptable.
And yet still, plenty of women report persistent men telling them to remove their headphones so they can engage in unwanted conversation.
The alienation was already there; the headphone just made it more acceptable to signal.
There will always be some people who don't want to talk to strangers, but how much of what we experience is due to social conditioning?
As for women who don't want to be approached, harassment is an entirely different issue. Just because talking to strangers and harassing women were more acceptable in the past doesn't mean that one follows from the other.
> As for women who don't want to be approached, harassment is an entirely different issue. Just because talking to strangers and harassing women were more acceptable in the past doesn't mean that one follows from the other.
Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment. They all make the recipient uncomfortable, and others should be able to identify and respect anti-openness signaling like wearing earbuds or not sustaining eye contact.
>Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment.
I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me.
When everything is "harassment" nothing is.
> I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me.
Well, I absolutely 100% consider these types harrassing yes. The indicative parts is that they are 100% selfish in their reasons to contact (the jehovah's want to make themselves feel good by spreading their religion, the sellers want income). There's zero in it for me, there is zero consideration for me. I'm just a target for their gratification.
And they have no interest in my objections. I don't even open the door anymore to people I don't know because it's always bad news.
There are strangers I would like to talk to. It is just that most strangers are not someone I would like to talk to - if I wanted to talk to somebody I could just remove my airpods.
This isn't part of the social conditioning, it is because most people are not very interesting.
There are just a lot more people now. It would be exhausting to try to talk to everyone one runs across in a day. 100 years ago, that was not true.
Two hundred years ago London already had 1.4M inhabitants.
But it creates social problems when people aren't talking among opposed "parties". That's why we now have social isolation and radicalization issues across the world.
> It is socially unacceptable to wear a T-shirt saying "please don't talk to me"
since when?
I think scale is the issue here. Our communities got too big and too virtual. In an intimate village, no one has the privilege to say "well I just don't want to interact with anyone outside" - this is uncompromising. Our society, via scale, affords you the ability to not be a part of. It's very self-reinforcing because the larger and robust you make the society, the more people want to secure privacy. The argument that a species that evolved and survived largely in part due to being highly social would suddenly seek privacy indicates something else is wrong in the environment imho (and it's really not hard to do evidence discovery here at all, you can find them via observation or following the money).
Why would you talk to a stranger when you can keep in touch with your friends and family?
It can be fun talking to new people outside your bubble.
I'm more of the shy type, but I always enjoyed traveling by train with a friend who can strike a conversation with everyone.
It created a brand-new concept of private listening, I think. Music listening must have been a communal thing up until then mostly (I'm counting record players in this, so we'd need to go further back before the 20th century to consider what I'm saying). It does follow that the more we allow you to do by yourself, the more you won't do with others. Take eating by yourself for example. I can't imagine that being a common thing before our time. Tech is really putting us into a spaceship. Your little dwelling is just a ship with a terminal, and you can definitely slap on some headphones and put a screen in front of you and basically float through space in your spaceship until the day you die.
We can probably measure the impact this is having culturally specifically in non-western cultures, because their baseline is not as anti-social compared to the west.
I think it's also worth noting that many are not going to read this article and go "hah, they got it totally wrong". They didn't. Mass scale human behavioral change has the been the story for a while now.
From the article:
> The sudden rise of headphone wearing pedestrians - spurred by Sony’s lightweight headsets (17% the weight of others)
Funny to see this trend has completely reversed. People wear more and more huge behemoths of headphones again. Not that I mind that but I find it an interesting development.
The article also goes on about beepers/pagers. I didn't know these were also demonised. I really miss mine in fact, it was great to be reachable while not constantly sending my location to 2000 "trusted partners". Unfortunately here in Spain there is no longer even a single pager network in operation.
A dumbphone only gets part of the way, as the operator still knows pretty well where I'm hanging out. As does the government.
FWIW, I see far more people wearing earbuds out in public than wearing over-the-ear headphones. Grand View Research reports that earbuds outsell headphones by a wide margin (https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/earphone...) - this is in the U.S. though; Spain may differ.
> The market for earphones accounted for around 90% of the overall share in 2022 and is anticipated to witness a CAGR of 13.2 % from 2023 to 2030
True but the over the head ones I see are the big expensive ones, that's what I meant. Where once the weight and size of the headphones contributed to the adoption of the walkman, it seems to be not so much an issue anymore.
> ...nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music...
I have no desire to go back to that. New music is being created WORLDWIDE constantly and we also have a few hundred years of already-made music. There's no way I could even come close to 'owning' all of the music I'd want to own.
Discovering good new music is a problem becasuse there's so much of it. Since '99 I've been listening to one of the first streaming internet station. DJs give them one to two hour sets that go into rotation. There's no limit to the variety - you'll get an hour of Portuguese Fado music (was a fad in L.A. for awhile) followed by 8-bit video game music then Iranian music... I like it because it's curated by humans and not computer.
The good old days sucked. I have a large collection of CDs that I "own" and they're in a box in the basement because the medium is irrelevant.
For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.
I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78. And some of that stuff has an EXACT AND PRECISE 0.00% of having ever been carried in a physical shop on physical media such as: a DJ set consisting mainly of remixes of The Hacker tracks from the late 90s, recorded by a Canadian DJ in a Frankfurt Studio in 2025.
We're eating perfectly-prepared filet every day and people are reminiscing about school cafeteria salisbury steak.
> For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.
> I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78.
Counterpoint: I haven't bought a record in over 10 years. That is, I have added exactly zero full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2014. Even though I stopped spending money, I didn't have to stop (legally) listening.
If your numbers are correct, this (being able to play the music that I've listened to over the last 10 years) is something would have cost me over $1500.
> The good old days sucked
They didn’t suck. Like many situations that were resource constrained they had unique positive attributes even though you have a strong preference for the alternative strictly speaking.
Sometimes being constrained forces you to have a different and better experience, like when you’re young and broke and have adventures, or there’s a power outage and the city turns into a party, or when you miss the bus and have an interesting walk.
I was and am a musician and massive music fan. I miss the experience of being on a long train trip with only 10 CDs and really deeply connecting to each of them with no distractions. I miss discovering something on a record store clerk’s recommendation. And it’s not fair to say I just miss being younger those were specific experiences and they were pleasant.
I’m not saying I’m going back, or that we all should. I am happy with unlimited access to everything that’s also great. But back then it didn’t suck, it was great in a different way.
I think the vast majority of people don't really give a shit about music and don't think about it deeply. They just need something to listen to.
> We're eating perfectly-prepared filet every day and people are reminiscing about school cafeteria salisbury steak.
I stopped digging, but from what I hear in the mainstream it tastes more like plastic burger than triple-a filet.
>but from what I hear in the mainstream it tastes more like plastic burger than triple-a filet.
When has it not?
Honestly it was better before, in france most of pop songs are utter s*t now, it used to be a blend of various degrees, from laughable dumpster fire to nice to great timeless pop music (goldman, cabrel, balavoine). You could say the same about brit pop, I still dig the police, dire straits, in ways that surprise me even today. There really was, afaik, a higher base floor.
This is well said and I agree that nostalgia for old systems is overdone… os2warpman :-)
don't fall for it, nobody owns the music
the musicians making it know this deep down. it's like the music is there, and the musician who "made" it indeed only brought it from "there" to here. that is it.
at most you own the medium in which the music's representation is stored, which is streaming's problem. the medium is your internet connection if anything
I am a musician and I don’t know this at all, in fact I think sociopathic Silcon Valley assholes have created so much human misery and exploitation that it’s time to consider killing and eating them.
Or maybe we should just help ourselves to whatever it is you consider valuable.
I find it impossible to determine the value of my own work.
the saturation of content makes me regard the work of uploading my own 'done' work into a cloud provider (so that anybody can stream my music for free) as not worth the kick I would get from meaningless metrics determined by the same cloud platform into which I would upload my stuff if I did which I won't as it's worthless to do.
> I find it impossible to determine the value of my own work.
A good starting point is the amount people are willing to pay for it.
> Since '99 I've been listening to one of the first streaming internet station.
Care to share which one? I personally like FIP.
Dublab. They have a few stations - LA (the original), Spain, Germany, Japan. Brazil seems to be gone though. It was all started by USC music geeks.
> Discovering good new music is a problem becasuse there's so much of it
Not really, discovering it is a problem because it is hidden. Current algorithms are designed to revert you to the same old and to show you stuff similar to what you have seen. You need to know specific terms to find something new - but of course if it is truly new for you, you do not know those terms.
I’ve discovered tons of music through the YouTube algorithm over the past 15ish years, and it’s definitely not all ‘similar to what [I] have seen’.
That's why I listen to dublab - it's human-curated.
Articles like this read a bit like the tech equivalent of "The climate has always changed". Yes, sure, new technologies have always spurred anxieties and moral panic - they also usually had some real impact on the social fabric. But the question is what kind of impact, and if the impact of current technologies is really the same as in the past.
> Yes, sure, new technologies have always spurred anxieties and moral panic
Have they though? Because scanning those headlines I get a vivid image in my head of newspapermen salivating at the chance to fabricate a moral panic out of thin air.
[dead]
Little did they know what was coming.
Thing 1: Everyone staring into their smartphones, nobody conversing at all. In many context where in the past, people would have started conversations out of sheer boredom, but made social connections that way.
Thing 2: A good 50% (and growing) people on sidewalks, bike paths etc. are completely oblivious to auditory stimuli such as callouts like "may I pass please" or bike bells or, for that matter, cars! Inevitably they have Airpods-style earphones in. With advanced environmental noise cancellation. At least the foam pad on-ear headphones of the Walkman era let other sounds through.
Oh, nostalgia! Now everyone is wearing wireless earbuds, even while riding a bike. And in greater numbers than I ever saw Walkman headphones. And yet humanity has somehow survived.
Here in Zurich the trend right now with young women is apple's over-ear AirPods. On bikes, walking in the city, everywhere.
Is the implication that it's ok for people driving a 3 ton car to listen to music, but not for people on a 30kg bike?
And deaf people shouldn't be allowed to do either?
Wearing headphones while driving is illegal in most places, as it should be. I personally think people biking while wearing headphones are unwise but at least they’re unlikely to hurt someone else while doing it.
I think the point is that you can buy a road legal vehicle where the driver is entirely encased in glass/steal with anywhere from 5-30 powered speakers to use at any volume they want but we still end up having these "people existing outside with headphones is bad because every piece of the earth has been handed to cars" arguments.
In most US states there are no restrictions to driving with headphones on. By my quick count only six states ban it, and a handful more say you have to have one ear uncovered.
> Wearing headphones while driving is illegal in most places, as it should be.
Where is this?
Is it illegal to drive deaf?
Sadly it is in France, although not because driving while not being able to hear is bad (otherwise car radios would be banned), but because they wanted to ban it for cyclists and motorbikes.
https://www.visordown.com/news/general/france-bans-earphones
> And deaf people shouldn't be allowed to do either?
That's a poor comparison, for a few reasons.
1. Headphones can prevent you from responding to outside sounds in at least two ways: (1) the sound from the headphones might mask the outside sound so it is not audible to you, and (2) you might be distracted enough by the sound from the headphones that even if the outside sound is audible through the headphones you fail to notice it. Also that distraction can also take your attention away from other important things needed for safe driving.
Deafness only prevents you from responding to outside sounds by making it so you don't hear them. It does not add distractions on top of that.
2. Deafness is a disability. We often relax rules for people with disabilities to help them have a more ordinary life.
In the US less than 2 percent of the population is deaf. Letting that small number of people drive despite not being able to hear provides them with great benefit. It probably does slightly increase the overall accident rate but with it only being 2 percent or less of drivers the effect is limited.
People with headphones appears to be way higher than 2 percent. They will have a much bigger impact the 2 percent who are deaf.
3. Deaf people have likely been deaf for most or all of their lives. I'd expect they have learned to compensate by paying more attention visually to their surroundings. When they learned to drive they were likely taught the importance of such compensation and have been practicing and perfecting it ever since.
Headphones are temporary. Very few people wearing headphones while driving are going to have the compensation skills that deaf people have for dealing with not hearing outside sounds.
> 1. Headphones can prevent you from responding to outside sounds in at least two ways: (1) the sound from the headphones might mask the outside sound so it is not audible to you, and (2) you might be distracted enough by the sound from the headphones that even if the outside sound is audible through the headphones you fail to notice it. Also that distraction can also take your attention away from other important things needed for safe driving.
Cars have come with radios for nearly a century, tape players for 50+ years, and many drivers play their music so loud you can hear it even when sitting in another car
Clearly depriving or overloading auditory input is not deemed to be a risk
>Now everyone is wearing wireless earbuds, even while riding a bike.
Wind in the ears can be a problem. Blocking the wind helps people hear cars/ dangers better, provided the music is off/ very low volume. I, and several other cyclists i know wear buds (no music) for this reason. You can't always tell if people are listening to music, or not. With walkman headphones, i always remember being able to hear the high frequencies of other people's music.
> humanity has somehow survived
debatable.
If so, I doubt the earbuds are the reason. But let's say “mankind”, instead, for precision's sake.
The mobile phone holds way more functions. Back then, you have listend to your favorite album. No distraction, no incoming messages, nobody called. Today, you get distracted while listening to one single song, mom calls, other waiting you fill their lonely life and so on. Together with social media that thing will make the dumb dumber.
> Some said it was a sign of a continued rise of Reagan and Thatcher style individualism. Cultural critic Allan Bloom deemed the Walkman "a nonstop... masturbational fantasy” in his 1987 book ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ Neo-Luddite John Zerzan saw the Walkman as part of a modern trend that encouraged a "protective sort of withdrawal from social connections" and Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug "soma," from Huxley's Brave New World, creating, as he put it, "an airtight bubble of sound" that was nothing but a "sensory depressant." In other words it all felt ‘a bit blackmirror’ as one might say today. (A collection of quotes collected in this 1999 Reason Magazine article)
not sure about the masturbational fantasy but the rest seems fairly spot on as a critique?
The value proposition for the portable cassette deck, as opposed to the transistor radio, was an ad-free experience and content that was chosen by the user, rather than pushed by an algorithm (aka the DJ/station director/promoter/advertising sponsors/payola.)
Funnily enough, I still mostly just listen to the radio, especially in my car. I turn it on, done. No selecting tracks or streams, no fiddling with aux cords, bluetooth, it's just the easiest thing.
I had a walkman in the early 1980s, and really didn't end up using it that much, for similar reasons. They ate batteries, a cassette tape would run for about 20-30 minutes before you had to turn it over, so one tape got repetitive pretty quickly, and carrying more than a few tapes became inconvenient if you were out and about.
I later got a walkman-like device that was just a radio, which was much lighter and more practical if I was out on a long walk or run.
I prefer the silence of people with headphones to the noise of sodcasters broadcasting Tik Tok clips or just the worst cheesy autotune pop drivel[1].
1. Apologies if autotune pop music is your thing but it makes my skin crawl so please, keep it to yourself.
100% this too. It was a lot worse when people felt free to play their phone in public on loudspeaker.
> Oscar Gross was preparing to take the case all the way to the supreme court, but backed out after someone was killed crossing the street while wearing headphones. The kind of tragic anecdote that is the inevitable and unavoidable price of freedom.
I'm sure the car who hit pedestrian was equipped with a cassette radio.
Let's keep this in mind as we read about whatever thing is ruining us today...
Just wait until those people from the 1980s see what was coming in just a few decades.
If the people of the 80s could only have imagined zombies walking around staring at their walkman. Their poor heads would have exploded with the first stories of people walking into poles, open man holes, etc.
People joked about those people back then too. They were just reading a book or newspaper while walking.
We used to care so much about people, now we don’t care if they’re hit by a bus, unless showing that we care gives us some kind of benefit. Transactional empathy.
Did we? People in our tribe perhaps. Others not so much. There have been some golden eras of high trust societies, though usually only among homogenous populations.
So the less we see of ourselves in others, the less we give a shit about them? Makes sense, is this is why forced diversity initiatives have created so much controversy?
This reminds me of the story of the young man who was walking to get his mail when a helicopter fell out of the sky and killed him. Articles immediately blamed him for listening to his iPod, as if regular people know the subtle (?) sounds of a failing helicopter overhead.
https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Pedestrian,_three_others_kill...
People's rush to blame the victim never ceases to amaze me. I think that people see that the victim did X, and they don't do X, therefore they'll never suffer a similar fate, and they need to proudly proclaim it to the world. Maybe it's related to magical thinking and the just world fallacy.
The reality of random, unavoidable death is one of the most terrifying aspects of the world. So coming up with reasons for the death, or ways to avoid it helps people cope with the existential dread that they too could die randomly one day through no fault of their own.
I am making up numbers but wearing headphones surely at least doubles the risk of randomly dying to falling helicopters. You get oblivious to traffic.
So the moral of this straw man is that it's not risk-increasing to walk around oblivious to your surroundings?
Thank you for the excellent example of victim-blaming. Tell me, what does a failing helicopter falling out of the sky sound like? I need to know what I'm supposed to be listening for.
It sounds like a straw man. When you're crossing a street, it would be prudent to be able to hear cars.