by sevensor
11 subcomments
- 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.
by comrade1234
4 subcomments
- > ...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.
- 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.
by MarkusWandel
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- > 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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