7 ms·

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

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.

Yeul 1y ago
Why would you talk to a stranger when you can keep in touch with your friends and family?
- Mashimo 1y ago
  It 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 ago
Lots 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 ago
  There 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 ago
    There 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.
    - adrianN 1y ago
      Two hundred years ago London already had 1.4M inhabitants.
  - t-3 1y ago
    > 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. Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment. They all make the recipient uncomfortable, and others should be able to identify and respect anti-openness signaling like wearing earbuds or not sustaining eye contact.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment. I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me. When everything is "harassment" nothing is.
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        > I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me. Well, I absolutely 100% consider these types harrassing yes. The indicative parts is that they are 100% selfish in their reasons to contact (the jehovah's want to make themselves feel good by spreading their religion, the sellers want income). There's zero in it for me, there is zero consideration for me. I'm just a target for their gratification. And they have no interest in my objections. I don't even open the door anymore to people I don't know because it's always bad news.
- ivape 1y ago
  I think scale is the issue here. Our communities got too big and too virtual. In an intimate village, no one has the privilege to say "well I just don't want to interact with anyone outside" - this is uncompromising. Our society, via scale, affords you the ability to not be a part of. It's very self-reinforcing because the larger and robust you make the society, the more people want to secure privacy. The argument that a species that evolved and survived largely in part due to being highly social would suddenly seek privacy indicates something else is wrong in the environment imho (and it's really not hard to do evidence discovery here at all, you can find them via observation or following the money).
- slater 1y ago
  > It is socially unacceptable to wear a T-shirt saying "please don't talk to me" since when?
- 1718627440 1y ago
  But it creates social problems when people aren't talking among opposed "parties". That's why we now have social isolation and radicalization issues across the world.
- tkj922 1y ago
  Why is wearing a tshirt that says "please do not talk to me" socially unacceptable, whereas using headphones is fine? I am genuinely curious
allenu 1y ago
The early criticism was overblown, but I think there is a slow, gradual degradation of social values when ubiquitous technology allows people to disengage easily. I remember being annoyed when a coworker had AirPods on constantly, even when conversing with other people. Obviously we could have a conversation, but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though). In the early days when everyone was starting to get smartphones, there were lots of memes about people staring at their phones constantly and maybe walking into traffic or bumping into people. Constant smartphone use has been normalized now (for better or worse). In the early days, people felt bad when they pulled out their phone to look something up during a conversation, but that behavior is no longer looked down on. It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.
- budding2141 1y ago
  >but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give I still feel like this. >It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit. And I do not agree about this either. Also, I think most of the people I spend my time with would also agree. But perhaps I'm (unfortunately) an outlier.
- watwut 1y ago
  Not putting headphones down or just scrolling during conversation is considered rude around me. It is ok to scroll to find info about something you discuss, it is ok to scroll when not conversing during longer trip etc ... but it is not ok to just take phone out mid conversation and scroll a bit.
- biker142541 1y ago
  >It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit. This feels incredibly rude, and I honestly don’t know anyone who would not consider this rude.
  - allenu 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ivape 1y ago
It created a brand-new concept of private listening, I think. Music listening must have been a communal thing up until then mostly (I'm counting record players in this, so we'd need to go further back before the 20th century to consider what I'm saying). It does follow that the more we allow you to do by yourself, the more you won't do with others. Take eating by yourself for example. I can't imagine that being a common thing before our time. Tech is really putting us into a spaceship. Your little dwelling is just a ship with a terminal, and you can definitely slap on some headphones and put a screen in front of you and basically float through space in your spaceship until the day you die. We can probably measure the impact this is having culturally specifically in non-western cultures, because their baseline is not as anti-social compared to the west. I think it's also worth noting that many are not going to read this article and go "hah, they got it totally wrong". They didn't. Mass scale human behavioral change has the been the story for a while now.
lucumo 1y ago
> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger. Good. I'm not your personal entertainment machine. Bring a book if you get bored.
- mulnz 1y ago
  An object lesson in civility in 2 comments.
  - lucumo 1y ago
    Why is it "civil" to impose yourself on others and "uncivil" to let others be?
    - Balinares 1y ago
      Most humans do not think of engaging with another human as an imposition.
      - lucumo 1y ago
        Don't be silly. Yes they do. What's much more likely is that you and I are thinking of different scenarios. I'm not thinking about your average hellos, thank-yous, good-mornings, questions, requests for assistance, short remarks, et cetera. Few people would find those objectionable, and neither do I. But the person monologuing about a singular uninteresting topic is so universally disliked that comedians have for decades been joking about sitting next to them on the plane. Or the salesman, questionnaire filler, petition peddler, or beggar trying to get something from you. I have yet to find anyone who likes those people. And then there's the chatterbox who just. won't. stop. talking. I think you can fill books with the number of articles written about dealing with them. The problem with all those people is that they are hard to get rid of once you allow even a little bit. It's far easier to not let it get started in the first place. Headphones are a popular way to prevent that. You can even see it mentioned as a strategy in this thread. Anyway, those people are imposing themselves. Loads of people dislike that, and so do I. These people are either out to get something from you, or are using you as an audience for their own stuff.
elcapitan 1y ago
Avoiding "conversations" with strangers is exactly why I wear them. (Putting conversations into quotes here because it's almost always people who want to hold a monolog on their favorite topic)
- Autaural 1y ago
  [dead]
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Yes, I also agree with the dead reply here, I also use my headphones to avoid beggars and street fundraisers. They are incredibly persistent here. Sometimes they even block my path. Which risks causing me getting physical of course, I don't mean violent but I would push them aside if they don't let me pass. And the fundraisers are no longer happy with a couple bucks (they could just carry a payment terminal), no you have to give all your personal details and sign up for a recurring support plan. No way I will ever do that. And the beggars, I really don't carry money anymore. But having headphones in really helps avoid these people. I can see them looking at me, seeing my headphones and subconsciously eliminating me from their list of targets. I'm not even really into music but I usually listen to nature sounds and have the noise cancelling on full blast. It also helps reduce stress and fatigue from overly loud city noises like big diesel buses, assholes that have to honk constantly when traffic is stuck, etc. I still hear them of course but it doesn't feel that heavy.
Raed667 1y ago
> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger from my experience, strangers who start a conversation with you in public always want something, usually money
Nifty3929 1y ago
There's a lot more immigration and diversity today, especially in urban and sub-urban America. While laudatory in many respects, I think it also reduces social interaction because there's less shared cultural background, beliefs, or even language that might otherwise have lubricated these interactions. I'm just being descriptive here, not normative.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  Only if you think of the other person as lesser than you or you are fearful of the interaction. Traveling abroad and being a tourist, usually invites tons of conversation and sharing of culture from both sides, especially if the person visiting has put in effort to learn the language.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  But why do you desire to communicate with literally everyone in a big city? I don't care about that. The reason I live in a big city is that it has enough of a base to make even small fringey communities viable. Such as the makerspace I'm part of, and some more NSFW activities too. I'm sure 95% of people don't care about those things but for me they are very defining.
wkat4242 1y ago
People in cities have a need to distance themselves. It's not a village where you can know everyone. We have a strong innate need to limit our social circles. Before the walkman there was the newspaper as a tool for isolation. Besides, who says it is desirable that a stranger can strike up a conversation with me at any time? The people that want this are overhelmingly living in villages anyway where they can do their thing.
mystified5016 1y ago
I can count on one hand the number of times a stranger approached me and didn't either try to harrass me or ask me for money. I don't think my headphones are depriving me of some grand experience of human life.

Yeul 1y ago

Why would you talk to a stranger when you can keep in touch with your friends and family?

Mashimo 1y ago
It 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 ago

Lots 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 ago
There 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 ago
  There 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.
  - adrianN 1y ago
    Two hundred years ago London already had 1.4M inhabitants.
- t-3 1y ago
  > 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. Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment. They all make the recipient uncomfortable, and others should be able to identify and respect anti-openness signaling like wearing earbuds or not sustaining eye contact.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >Unwanted advances, whether sexual, social, or commercial in nature, are all harassment. I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me. When everything is "harassment" nothing is.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      > I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me. Well, I absolutely 100% consider these types harrassing yes. The indicative parts is that they are 100% selfish in their reasons to contact (the jehovah's want to make themselves feel good by spreading their religion, the sellers want income). There's zero in it for me, there is zero consideration for me. I'm just a target for their gratification. And they have no interest in my objections. I don't even open the door anymore to people I don't know because it's always bad news.
ivape 1y ago
I think scale is the issue here. Our communities got too big and too virtual. In an intimate village, no one has the privilege to say "well I just don't want to interact with anyone outside" - this is uncompromising. Our society, via scale, affords you the ability to not be a part of. It's very self-reinforcing because the larger and robust you make the society, the more people want to secure privacy. The argument that a species that evolved and survived largely in part due to being highly social would suddenly seek privacy indicates something else is wrong in the environment imho (and it's really not hard to do evidence discovery here at all, you can find them via observation or following the money).
slater 1y ago
> It is socially unacceptable to wear a T-shirt saying "please don't talk to me" since when?
1718627440 1y ago
But it creates social problems when people aren't talking among opposed "parties". That's why we now have social isolation and radicalization issues across the world.
tkj922 1y ago
Why is wearing a tshirt that says "please do not talk to me" socially unacceptable, whereas using headphones is fine? I am genuinely curious

allenu 1y ago

The early criticism was overblown, but I think there is a slow, gradual degradation of social values when ubiquitous technology allows people to disengage easily. I remember being annoyed when a coworker had AirPods on constantly, even when conversing with other people. Obviously we could have a conversation, but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though). In the early days when everyone was starting to get smartphones, there were lots of memes about people staring at their phones constantly and maybe walking into traffic or bumping into people. Constant smartphone use has been normalized now (for better or worse). In the early days, people felt bad when they pulled out their phone to look something up during a conversation, but that behavior is no longer looked down on. It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.

budding2141 1y ago
>but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give I still feel like this. >It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit. And I do not agree about this either. Also, I think most of the people I spend my time with would also agree. But perhaps I'm (unfortunately) an outlier.
watwut 1y ago
Not putting headphones down or just scrolling during conversation is considered rude around me. It is ok to scroll to find info about something you discuss, it is ok to scroll when not conversing during longer trip etc ... but it is not ok to just take phone out mid conversation and scroll a bit.
biker142541 1y ago
>It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit. This feels incredibly rude, and I honestly don’t know anyone who would not consider this rude.
- allenu 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ivape 1y ago

It created a brand-new concept of private listening, I think. Music listening must have been a communal thing up until then mostly (I'm counting record players in this, so we'd need to go further back before the 20th century to consider what I'm saying). It does follow that the more we allow you to do by yourself, the more you won't do with others. Take eating by yourself for example. I can't imagine that being a common thing before our time. Tech is really putting us into a spaceship. Your little dwelling is just a ship with a terminal, and you can definitely slap on some headphones and put a screen in front of you and basically float through space in your spaceship until the day you die. We can probably measure the impact this is having culturally specifically in non-western cultures, because their baseline is not as anti-social compared to the west. I think it's also worth noting that many are not going to read this article and go "hah, they got it totally wrong". They didn't. Mass scale human behavioral change has the been the story for a while now.

lucumo 1y ago

> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger. Good. I'm not your personal entertainment machine. Bring a book if you get bored.

mulnz 1y ago
An object lesson in civility in 2 comments.
- lucumo 1y ago
  Why is it "civil" to impose yourself on others and "uncivil" to let others be?
  - Balinares 1y ago
    Most humans do not think of engaging with another human as an imposition.
    - lucumo 1y ago
      Don't be silly. Yes they do. What's much more likely is that you and I are thinking of different scenarios. I'm not thinking about your average hellos, thank-yous, good-mornings, questions, requests for assistance, short remarks, et cetera. Few people would find those objectionable, and neither do I. But the person monologuing about a singular uninteresting topic is so universally disliked that comedians have for decades been joking about sitting next to them on the plane. Or the salesman, questionnaire filler, petition peddler, or beggar trying to get something from you. I have yet to find anyone who likes those people. And then there's the chatterbox who just. won't. stop. talking. I think you can fill books with the number of articles written about dealing with them. The problem with all those people is that they are hard to get rid of once you allow even a little bit. It's far easier to not let it get started in the first place. Headphones are a popular way to prevent that. You can even see it mentioned as a strategy in this thread. Anyway, those people are imposing themselves. Loads of people dislike that, and so do I. These people are either out to get something from you, or are using you as an audience for their own stuff.

elcapitan 1y ago

Avoiding "conversations" with strangers is exactly why I wear them. (Putting conversations into quotes here because it's almost always people who want to hold a monolog on their favorite topic)

Autaural 1y ago
[dead]
wkat4242 1y ago
Yes, I also agree with the dead reply here, I also use my headphones to avoid beggars and street fundraisers. They are incredibly persistent here. Sometimes they even block my path. Which risks causing me getting physical of course, I don't mean violent but I would push them aside if they don't let me pass. And the fundraisers are no longer happy with a couple bucks (they could just carry a payment terminal), no you have to give all your personal details and sign up for a recurring support plan. No way I will ever do that. And the beggars, I really don't carry money anymore. But having headphones in really helps avoid these people. I can see them looking at me, seeing my headphones and subconsciously eliminating me from their list of targets. I'm not even really into music but I usually listen to nature sounds and have the noise cancelling on full blast. It also helps reduce stress and fatigue from overly loud city noises like big diesel buses, assholes that have to honk constantly when traffic is stuck, etc. I still hear them of course but it doesn't feel that heavy.

Raed667 1y ago

> It’s a lot harder than it used to be to start a conversation with a stranger from my experience, strangers who start a conversation with you in public always want something, usually money

Nifty3929 1y ago

There's a lot more immigration and diversity today, especially in urban and sub-urban America. While laudatory in many respects, I think it also reduces social interaction because there's less shared cultural background, beliefs, or even language that might otherwise have lubricated these interactions. I'm just being descriptive here, not normative.

Larrikin 1y ago
Only if you think of the other person as lesser than you or you are fearful of the interaction. Traveling abroad and being a tourist, usually invites tons of conversation and sharing of culture from both sides, especially if the person visiting has put in effort to learn the language.
wkat4242 1y ago
But why do you desire to communicate with literally everyone in a big city? I don't care about that. The reason I live in a big city is that it has enough of a base to make even small fringey communities viable. Such as the makerspace I'm part of, and some more NSFW activities too. I'm sure 95% of people don't care about those things but for me they are very defining.

wkat4242 1y ago

People in cities have a need to distance themselves. It's not a village where you can know everyone. We have a strong innate need to limit our social circles. Before the walkman there was the newspaper as a tool for isolation. Besides, who says it is desirable that a stranger can strike up a conversation with me at any time? The people that want this are overhelmingly living in villages anyway where they can do their thing.

mystified5016 1y ago

I can count on one hand the number of times a stranger approached me and didn't either try to harrass me or ask me for money. I don't think my headphones are depriving me of some grand experience of human life.