The AirPods Effect

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• The author is from Germany and still complaining about Americans interacting with each other less in public? I've been to Germany so many times and almost never seen anyone speaking to strangers on trains/buses/trams. Once I was on a train from Cologne to Frankfurt with a colleague and we were talking nonstop. After a while we realized it was just us talking and probably disturbing everyone else!

  People go to extreme lengths to avoid talking to strangers on public transport even in developing countries. Earphones are just so effective.

  by malshe
• > 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.

  by shevis
• > Where I live, in southwest Germany, AirPods are far less common.

  FWIW I live in Amsterdam (also western Europe) and anyone in the streets under 50 is wearing them, myself included.

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

  As a GenYer I find this rude and I'll take them out any time I interact with someone.

  My point being that their ubiquity doesn't have to mean people being rude or indifferent to eachother.

  I think people have the right to choose comfort and focus, anywhere outside of a conversation with another person.

  by jorisw
• I'd much rather be surrounded by people wearing earbuds than have people watching tiktoks through their phone speakers on the subway
  by MBlume
• After reading about the default mode network here a few times recently, I think missing out on all that critical "daydreaming" time is a bigger problem. I've stopped listening to things while I'm out walking, and I've noticed a lot more solutions and ideas coming to me. The DMN seems to fall into a similar area as meditation (remember when that was all the rage among tech leaders?); the lowered input noise gives the brain time to clear things out.
  by bejd
• 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.

  by tptacek
• To be fair when you live in a big city and you have to take the subway all the time, it just feels physically nice to remove the background noise whether it's the noise of the train itself or the musicians or the people asking loudly for money. I don't even have airpods, I have good old earplugs because I often too lazy to choose the soundtrack of my own life.

  It's not that don't want to talk to unknown people, it's that it's more important for me to avoid the unpleasantness of it all. It's all relative of course, I'd take a fast, crowded train any day rather than having to do the good old accelerate-and-stop of a traffic jam/city intersections.

  I live in a country with somewhat solid social net so I'd actually be in favor or preventing people to ask for money (loudly and in a pathos-optimized voice) in the train. It's generally people who are 1. having other income 2. drug addicts 3. mental issues or a combination of all that. I don't blame them but I wish there was a cruelty-free way of preventing them to do that because I don't think the amount of money they make is worth the amount of inconvenience they cause. Of course they are other ways of making the service better (more trains, closer to each other) but I believe the subway company is already hard at work on that.

  My point I guess is that it doesn't take much for something to become an unpleasant experience (as anyone who's ever had a significant dose of LSD will tell you) and that's it's easy to blame people (individualistic, selfish blablabla) but system-thinking is how you solve that kind of issue (and it's not easy)

  by cassepipe
• What I find interesting is that the article seems to imply that wearing earbuds to isolate is somewhat "unnatural" (for lack of a better term).

  However it does not take into account that the kind of social interactions where people wear earbuds (i.e. loud and busy environments with many strangers, often physically closer than comfortable) is unnatural to begin with.

  For me, isolating myself acoustically is a way to normalize such environments back to a more "natural" setting.

  by steve1977