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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
In "Smartphone use undermines enjoyment of face-to-face social interactions" by Dwyer et al, we see pretty conclusively that people report that the presence of smartphones reduce their enjoyment of conversing in person. If any readers have ever spent an extended time with loved ones "off grid" I'm sure they can relate.
I'm a techno optimist through and through. I've spent my life and career close to technology, but in the same breath I think we'd be foolish to pretend humanity's relationship is without drawbacks.
>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 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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] sevensor|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] allenu|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elcapitan|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Raed667|8 months ago|reply
from my experience, strangers who start a conversation with you in public always want something, usually money
[+] [-] wkat4242|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lucumo|8 months ago|reply
Good. I'm not your personal entertainment machine. Bring a book if you get bored.
[+] [-] ivape|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Nifty3929|8 months ago|reply
I'm just being descriptive here, not normative.
[+] [-] Yeul|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] edent|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mystified5016|8 months ago|reply
I don't think my headphones are depriving me of some grand experience of human life.
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] comrade1234|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] os2warpman|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] watwut|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ysofunny|8 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] whilenot-dev|8 months ago|reply
Care to share which one? I personally like FIP.
[+] [-] xg15|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] standardUser|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Autaural|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] relaxing|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MarkusWandel|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tempodox|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] joenot443|8 months ago|reply
I'm a techno optimist through and through. I've spent my life and career close to technology, but in the same breath I think we'd be foolish to pretend humanity's relationship is without drawbacks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
[+] [-] comrade1234|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Ylpertnodi|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|8 months ago|reply
debatable.
[+] [-] wkat4242|8 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] otterley|8 months ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] tom89999|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] atorodius|8 months ago|reply
not sure about the masturbational fantasy but the rest seems fairly spot on as a critique?
[+] [-] gwern|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anotherhue|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deadbabe|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Lio|8 months ago|reply
1. Apologies if autotune pop music is your thing but it makes my skin crawl so please, keep it to yourself.
[+] [-] wkat4242|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Nifty3929|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] snozolli|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yoyohello13|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jb1991|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|8 months ago|reply