Friday 6th July 2012 - Earphones and our personal worlds

A couple  of days ago I was walking across the concourse when I noticed a colleague I hadn't seen for some months.  Our paths were not going to cross exactly so when we were at the mimum distance apart I hailed him in a friendly fashion.  He kept on walking, didn't turn to acknowledge me, and that was that.  Wondering what I had done to offend him, I then noticed the earpiece and the wire leading from it and realised that he was listening to an iPod or other MP3 player. 

It has happened before with others.  Another pattern is that I approach someone out and about around the university for a chat and before we can start they have to take their earpieces out and fiddle with their player to turn it off so that they don't miss a beat of the music they were listening to before turning, perhaps less willingly, to a conversation with me.  The other pattern is to approach a lone person for a few words of greeting only to realise that they are already talking  to someone else via a headset and microphone.

From a social science perspective what is happening in all these cases is a re-definition of the boundary between private spaces and public spaces.  Indeed, in many ways what we are witnessing is the privatisation of public space through the use of personal sound fields to cut out wider public interaction.  Individuals can now retain their own private world and shut out others, whilst physically moving through public worlds.  The longer-term outcome could be a weakening of those little elements of civilty ('hello, how are you today?' and the like) that bind people into communities. It also means that individuals have greater control over who to interact with.  As someone who seems to spend quite a lot of time walking between university buildings, and greeting people on the way, I regret that.

But I will also confess that I put the earphones in and resort to my own iPod from time to time - most notably today when I was on the train to London and the only way I could cut out the distracting noise from the earphones of the person sitting opposite me was to turn on and tune in to my own choice of music, something which didn't have the rhythmic drum beat coming from the opposite side of the train table.  Perhaps there were others on the train who said 'hello' to me and I didn't hear them.