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The War on the Walkman
- deadbabe 1y agoWe 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.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoDid 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.
- deadbabe 1y agoSo the less we see of ourselves in others, the less we give a shit about them? Makes sense, is this is why forced diversity initiatives have created so much controversy?
- gwern 1y ago> 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.
- anotherhue 1y agoI'm sure the car who hit pedestrian was equipped with a cassette radio.
- jb1991 1y agoJust wait until those people from the 1980s see what was coming in just a few decades.
- dylan604 1y agoIf 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.
- lucumo 1y agoPeople joked about those people back then too. They were just reading a book or newspaper while walking.
- atorodius 1y ago> 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tempodox 1y agoOh, 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.
- comrade1234 1y agoHere in Zurich the trend right now with young women is apple's over-ear AirPods. On bikes, walking in the city, everywhere.
- ta1243 1y agoIs the implication that it's ok for people driving a 3 ton car to listen to music, but not for people on a 30kg bike? And deaf people shouldn't be allowed to do either?
- threetonesun 1y agoWearing headphones while driving is illegal in most places, as it should be. I personally think people biking while wearing headphones are unwise but at least they’re unlikely to hurt someone else while doing it.
- garciansmith 1y agoIn most US states there are no restrictions to driving with headphones on. By my quick count only six states ban it, and a handful more say you have to have one ear uncovered.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago> Wearing headphones while driving is illegal in most places, as it should be. Where is this? Is it illegal to drive deaf?
- ta1243 1y agoSadly it is in France, although not because driving while not being able to hear is bad (otherwise car radios would be banned), but because they wanted to ban it for cyclists and motorbikes. https://www.visordown.com/news/general/france-bans-earphones https://www.visordown.com/news/general/france-bans-earphones
- comrade1234 1y ago> ...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.
- ysofunny 1y agodon't fall for it, nobody owns the music 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
- CPLX 1y ago[flagged]
- ysofunny 1y agoI find it impossible to determine the value of my own work. the saturation of content makes me regard the work of uploading my own 'done' work into a cloud provider (so that anybody can stream my music for free) as not worth the kick I would get from meaningless metrics determined by the same cloud platform into which I would upload my stuff if I did which I won't as it's worthless to do.
- CPLX 1y ago> I find it impossible to determine the value of my own work. A good starting point is the amount people are willing to pay for it.
- relaxing 1y agoThe 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.)
- SoftTalker 1y agoFunnily 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.
- snozolli 1y agoThis 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_killed_in_helicopter_crash_in_British_Columbia 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 1y agoThe 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.
- rightbyte 1y agoI am making up numbers but wearing headphones surely at least doubles the risk of randomly dying to falling helicopters. You get oblivious to traffic.
- mhb 1y agoSo the moral of this straw man is that it's not risk-increasing to walk around oblivious to your surroundings?
- sevensor 1y agoWere 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.
- Yeul 1y agoWhy would you talk to a stranger when you can keep in touch with your friends and family?
- Mashimo 1y agoIt can be fun talking to new people outside your bubble. I'm more of the shy type, but I always enjoyed traveling by train with a friend who can strike a conversation with everyone.
- edent 1y agoLots 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.
- II2II 1y agoThere will always be some people who don't want to talk to strangers, but how much of what we experience is due to social conditioning? As for women who don't want to be approached, harassment is an entirely different issue. Just because talking to strangers and harassing women were more acceptable in the past doesn't mean that one follows from the other.
- brookst 1y agoThere are just a lot more people now. It would be exhausting to try to talk to everyone one runs across in a day. 100 years ago, that was not true.
- xg15 1y agoArticles 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.
- standardUser 1y ago> 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.
- Autaural 1y ago[dead]
- tom89999 1y agoThe 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.
- MarkusWandel 1y agoLittle 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.
- Nifty3929 1y agoLet's keep this in mind as we read about whatever thing is ruining us today...
- Lio 1y agoI 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.
- wkat4242 1y ago100% this too. It was a lot worse when people felt free to play their phone in public on loudspeaker.
- wkat4242 1y agoFrom 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.
- otterley 1y agoFWIW, 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-and-headphone-market 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
- wkat4242 1y agoTrue but the over the head ones I see are the big expensive ones, that's what I meant. Where once the weight and size of the headphones contributed to the adoption of the walkman, it seems to be not so much an issue anymore.