The AirPods Effect

> 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?

Like huge SUV and pickup trucks in urban environments, guns and the like; their usage - and the perceived need for them - is a strong code smell of inhumane environments.

Noise cancelling is a treasure.

What I like about them is the ease of use.

The author's going to be floored when he hears about video games

To me it’s just a proxy for the amount of economic activity in a place.

Every time I go to Melbourne airport in Australia, I’m shocked that nobody - nobody - has their laptop out. In Sydney a few people do. But go to any airport in the US and if not a majority are on laptops at least a large minority seem to be..

So yes - airpods in ears, laptops in airports, city lights at night. Just a sign of how plugged in everyone is to “something” that’s happening.

Lack of shared values and things to bond over.

Public, not pubic

> I felt like half the people around me in pubic had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.

Wearing on public transport: meh, the chances I chat with a total stranger is quite small.

Wearing on walks around my neighborhood: yes, totally see how this nudges away from spontaneous chats with neighbors / acquaintances as we pass each other and wave, but don't stop perhaps due to the friction of removing airpods and sense we may be interrupting each other.

Sometimes if I see a neighbor I know up ahead, I will preemptively remove my airpods to open the possibility of a chat. Most of the time just a hello, but sometimes a nice catch up. With the airpods, very unlikely to chat.

> They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets.

This hit me. I often use headphones during chores, including going grocery shopping. I love human interaction, but not while pickings things into my shopping basket. For years I'd also leave them in when paying (audio paused, of course). It took a cashier tell me I was being rude before I realized. She was absolutely right, of course. I do make an effort to visibly remove my headphones when expecting human interaction now. A big thanks to that cashier, and my apologies!

> Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. It also makes people less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone new. Many of those interviewed for the survey said they wore headphones in part to avoid having to talk to other people.

Well that sounds like correlation might not equal causation if i ever heard it.

we all have a choice to use or not and the depending of the context we live in there could be more or less benefits overall (metro city vs bucolic small European village). But what this article capture for me is something more philosophic, anthropologically as Aristotle told us we are social animal, and for about at least the past 5k years we benefited a lot as a group by contamination, etc.. now we live in more bubbles, bubbles are more diffused than previously and we must at least acknowledge what we are missing in the process. It's the same difference between old generalist medias, tv shows, books culture, and the more different possibilities and bubbles we live (more importantly grow, sometimes without touching the "local" "proverbial" grass). It's interesting to observe a social phenomenon that is mostly recent:

+ walkman 80s but diffused as today the Bluetooth headset only years later but not comparable

+ mp3 player 2000s not comparable as capabilities and more of a young adopt early technology

+ smartphones 2010s mass adoption but at least you hear mostly people around you.

+ air pods 10y ago on September -> in 10 years are adopted more than any of the previous tech. Adoption rate is hug (i consider also other brands)

and to be honest there is another topic correlated -> most young people have lived the covid pandemic and interiorizited some behavior

also grown up in some white collar sector live with headset after the pandemic, cause of smartwarking but also the more diffused use of team/zoom/meet in the workplace

now there is also ai (and it's a matter of time we will want a constant access to it that can also be headset related) and smart glasses are near than ever.

there could be consequences in less than 10y.

It's a social science matter nobody taking seriously.

Sorry but this “people aren’t the same because headphones” (or podcasts or <insert here>) is just too convenient a narrative especially when your pull quotes are from random college newspapers and small scale studies.

Having some music or a podcast to listen to on your commute is the new “I have a giant newspaper in front of my face”.

If you want to have a random conversation you totally can! But like all things in life - the other person may not want to have that conversation at that time.

looks like the seashells of Fahrenheit-451 were inevitable

First generation of AirPods Pro were the only in-canal earphones that didn't fall out of my ears (rare shape of ear canal and yes, I tried different sizes, they all fall out or don't fit).

Only have over-ears headphones, so I keep borrowing pods from my wife when I'm cleaning/exercising.

Was very disappointed when she lost them and the replacement - pro v3 - had fixed the rare shape and they started falling out like any other earbuds.

Who are these people who keep complaining about this supposed isolation and such? It's a complaint that periodically makes it on to Hacker News, but the more I think about it the more I feel like we're listening to a complaint made by a vanishing fraction of the population and giving them a more credence then they deserve because a few of them write with great pathos and drama.

But I'm old enough to have ridden the bus not just before AirPods but before really practical and widespread headphones in general. (Headphones have been available for a long time, but people did not routinely carry them around because they did not generally fit conveniently in a normal-sized pocket.) I've spent probably hundreds of hours on busses, much of that on a college campus where we were probably about as similar a social situation as we can be.

And busses were never rolling conversation hubs. They weren't tomb-silent but the conversations were almost always between parties who clearly knew each other. They weren't some sort of daily forum for the debate of politics, nor a reliable source of small talk.

The only one that I will agree is something I used to do was small talk with the checkout clerk, because the transaction takes long enough to be socially awkward to be standing in silence, but again, inconsequential small talk.

Every time I read one of these articles moaning about how we're all behind headphones and how impersonal the shopping experience has become, I become more convinced we're not listening to Important Social Commentary by Thoughtful Individuals... I think we're reading articles from that tiny minority of super-socially-aggressive people who used to incessently bother those around them with their overly intrusive attempts to converse with us in that distant past pissing and moaning about the fact that we now have the social ability to block them in a way that doesn't exceed our politeness threshold. The people that we've all met that we wish would just shut up, where we're sending them social signals and body language to please stop, and they just continue on.

Now this is what they write in response to that.

Now, I'll cop to being reasonably on the end of the "let me get in and out and accomplish my goal without your contribution", but I've spent plenty of time in contexts where I got to see other people in those contexts, especially as a child, and I just don't recognize the wonderland of social interaction these people seem to be missing out on. There was never a time where these random encounters (ignoring cases where you run into people you already know) were ever anything more than the briefest, most transient touch of humanity, and if someone is in a situation where they are starved for that, perhaps their problems are deeper and lie elsewhere and the solutions are something other than trying to convince everyone else to change for them.

Noise is a big problem but this is a terrible solution. People clearly hate noise. Rich neighbourhoods are always quiet. It's basically the point. We need to go hard on noise. I think it's one of the biggest sources of unhappiness today. We can start with motor vehicles which are easily the biggest single source of noise. People shouldn't have to disable their ears to deal with this constant assault.

Totally relatable. It's not just earphones. Put your phone and headphones away and then observe people. Every one except the 70 plus will be hooked on their phones. That 20 second wait between getting up to get off the train and waiting for the doors to open? Pull out your phone

Every desire for entertainment, education, distraction is filled by the phone. You're obselete.

You can spend hours in an extremely crowded city constantly bumping into people and feel the most alone you've ever felt in your life

Hyperindividualism has won

This sounds sad to say, but I went on a walk outside, my AirPods died and realized I hadn’t listened to the outside world in a long time. Was a nice reminder to take a breath sometimes and enjoy the world. I think we all forget that

> The number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019

This effect started well before Airods and even smart phones became ubiquitous. The airpods were released in Dec of 2016. Before Blackberries and Iphones, people on the subway all had daily newspapers in their face. In DC we had a free abridged version called the Express.

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.

Most headphones these days are also a headset, allowing for bi-directional communication. Does it make a difference?

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.

Yes there were all these people talking on the bus before wireless headphones.

> This habit of using headphones to dodge uncomfortable interactions may be especially common among younger adults, for whom social unease and feelings of isolation are well-documented problems that have become more common in recent decades.

Earphones (not specifically apple ones) are great for this. My city has become a touristy hotspot in the recent years, and you can't walk 50 meters through the city center without some homeless guy, or a romanian woman with a baby asking you for money, some "finnish" guys trying to sell your their music cd (that you have nowhere to insert anymore), some scammer offering you a flower or someone trying to sell you a boat tour of a city you've lived in your whole life.

Earphones in and you don't even have to reply, just ignore everyone.

If you want that warmth, you have to invite it in. It has nothing to do with the airpods.

Do you ever sit somewhere in public fully relaxed without a care in the world? Do you ever poke your head up to see who else is looking at what you're looking at? Is your expression neutral or natural?

There's always someone nearby doing the same. What happens when you spot them? Don't overthink it.

I’m so with you, thanks Markham!

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.

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!).

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

> 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.

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

TLDR: "I think AirPods increase social isolation, I don't have much good evidence for it, and although I started the article by observing how many MORE Americans use AirPods, I completely contradicted myself at the end by pointing out how Germans, who apparently use AirPods less, are still less friendly/warm to strangers than Americans."

Suspiciously close to an AI slop article.

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.

"And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time."

> 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.

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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.

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Meh. When I was young the old people complained that everyone was wearing walkmans (with those metal band orange foam headphones lol). It's just old man shouting at cloud. And no, I don't want to talk to everyone. Piss off and leave me alone.

I also hate noise and I really love wearing my earbuds (I don't use Apple) with no audio but just the noise cancelling on when I'm on public transport or walking. Sometimes with nature sounds like rain if the coverage is not strong enough.

I never listen to podcasts by the way, I truly hate them. Same with youtube videos, I just don't have patience to consume content at someone else's pace.

I stopped chit-chatting at the water cooler because I have a specific sense of humor that not everybody likes. And by "not likes", I mean the feminist women in my department get offended. Very easily. And because they're women, they hold special power wrt HR. So I just quietly spend my day now.

In America, I am _much_ less likely to encounter a friendly exchange with a a stranger than I am to be accosted for spare change by people for whom our obscenely wealthy systems have failed and/or decided are not worthy of assistance, so even small cities around rural areas have huge populations of unhoused people with a variety of deep-seated and untreated conditions.

Also, although I live in a medium-sized metro area with >8M people, it’s in the South, and I have zero access to public transportation. I prefer to use AirPods for music/podcasts/radio in my car, where I’m alone either way, so that I can more easily answer hands-free calls (which is necessary for my job).

Our society’s problem isn’t with AirPods, they’re just a symptom of the broader social decay that 80-years of inequality and deregulation has brought us.