The AirPods Effect

MBlume

I'd much rather be surrounded by people wearing earbuds than have people watching tiktoks through their phone speakers on the subway

chadgpt3

I started using them recently but I already wasn't talking to strangers for a long time before that. I suspect the constant stimulation suppresses the default-mode network, the idle wandering your mind normally experiences when you're doing nothing. Before that, I'd sometimes hold my phone up to my ear to listen to a podcast (even on the subway at minimum volume) but it was awkward so not ubiquitous. I think buying a paid of wireless earbuds was one of those decisions that made my life subtly worse overall, like eating a whole tub of ice cream.

lorecore

> People now wear their AirPods all day at the office. They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets. I wonder how people do this or if my ears are just shaped weird, because I can’t even sit totally still at my desk without them falling out.

tptacek

I don't remember any time in my life where it ever felt normal to me to randomly talk to strangers. I went to London when I was a teenager and was made uncomfortable by how chatty the cab drivers were. Later, I worked at a startup and my boss was preternaturally gifted at chatting up strangers, which he did habitually in every setting we were in when we traveled; on the plane, on the bus from the airport, &c. I remember feeling like he was a freak of nature. And I'm not an introvert! All of this long predates Airpods. I think this is a cultural difference, not a technological shift.

micromacrofoot

I actually use AirPods to assist my hearing in loud environments, but this aside... I think there's also the consideration of: how often have you really wanted a stranger to talk to you on the bus. I've talked to a few women about this, and they don't leave home without headphones because it gives them an excuse to ignore strangers hitting on them in public.

righthand

Phones/Screens and headphones are being optimized to blind you and deafen you from the real world. You dont care though because it creates a pseudo-safe-zone through social status signaling (look at my expensive headphones in my ears, I look so cool and technologically advanced!).

shevis

> Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. Correlation for sure, I’m less sure about causation though. It seems equally likely to me that other factors are driving increased social anxiety/isolation which in turn drives people to wear headphones to avoid social interactions.

hydrolox

looks like the seashells of Fahrenheit-451 were inevitable

ryukoposting

I didn't realize that research on this topic was so sparse, I just took it as a fact that people wearing airpods don't socialize in public. When I was in college, the line "he can't hear you, he has airpods in" was a meme. It was used as a jab at someone who wasn't paying attention because they had wireless earbuds in. So I know I'm not the only one who feels that way.

trhway

When Walkman came out: https://www.freethink.com/consumer-tech/sony-walkman-technop... "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.” Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug “soma,” from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” creating, as he put it, “an airtight bubble of sound” that was nothing but a “sensory depressant.” ... The Walkman, critics claimed, was more than just music to one’s ears. It was a tool of societal disconnect ... " Personally i wear AirPods only in one ear - don't want to be struck by anything i didn't hear coming, and that also doubles the battery time.

kylemaxwell

Eh. I'm autistic and audio overstimulation is very real for me. When out at a restaurant or similar public place, I often have my AirPods in with nothing playing, just noise cancellation. I can still chat with my wife or whomever is with me and hear them, albeit muffled, but it keeps everything else down and manageable. Perhaps I could get some of those Loops, which I understand are less obtrusive.

ActorNightly

> Americans are speaking to one another far less than they used to. According to that study, the number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. Each year during that time period, the number of words people spoke in an average day declined. I wonder what the difference is between this, and culture in EU where small talk isn't really a thing.

comrade1234

Do tattoos too. American living in Switzerland and it's shocking when I go back.

k2xl

"You Can't Miss It" https://k2xl.substack.com/p/you-cant-miss-it

Barbing

I’m so with you, thanks Markham!

tines

> Americans are speaking less and less to one another. The number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. Is it just me or does anyone else turn skeptical when seeing these precise numbers given to something that seems essentially impossible to measure with this accuracy?

walth

Come to the Midwest. Over friendly. Zero air pods effect.

Mistletoe

All my co-workers wear those and I hate it. Any attempt to talk to them about work or personal subjects means they have to hit their ear and pause it. It just makes me want to say nothing.

PaulHoule

Kinda funny but I think this situation is less bad than it was a year ago. For a while it seemed like young people were hard of hearing like the elderly, somebody would be camped in a weight machine at the gym resting for 30 minutes and I’d have to stick my hand in their face to get their attention or they’d be walking down the street and I couldn’t warn them about hazards on the sidewalk. Maybe it just doesn’t bother me anymore or maybe they’ve wised up.

karpovv-boris

I did notice the self-isolation effect of wearing any headphones a long time ago. Now, after a few years of using AirPods and finally switching back to cheap cable headphones only for work calls, it actually helps a lot for my brain to register context changes much more easily. And if you have adhd I highly recommend trying to do the same.