A typical street scene in New York: She is sitting in front of a cafe in the sunshine, he arrives, gives her a hug and they begin chatting. Both are wearing small, wireless headphones. But neither thinks to take them out.
It’s a trend that’s causing increasing annoyance, and it mostly involves Apple’s white AirPods, as well as other models made by Sennheiser and Samsung.
For a long time, the little wireless headphones were an object of ridicule. But now they seem to be everywhere: on the train, in the office, parents wear them to pick up children from school and friends wear them when they meet in bars.
The headphones tend not to be removed, unlike their forerunners with cables.
In Washington Square in Manhattan, one man says he wears them all the time. “They’re so comfortable to wear I often don’t notice I still have them in,” he says.
His headphone-less friend is not impressed. “I’m always telling him it annoys me,” he says, adding that he never knows whether his friend has them switched on or not.
Some headphone wearers seem to think it doesn’t matter whether they still have them in, because they can still listen to their friends.
But headphones can play a lot more than just music. Apple recently announced a new feature allowing AirPods to automatically read out incoming text messages.
Michael Niedeggen, a German professor of general psychology and neuropsychology, understands people’s reservations.
People are not semantically programmed to process two similar things at once, he says. You can walk and talk, or write and listen to classical music. “But as soon as you receive two pieces of verbal information it doesn’t work.”
That’s why it can affect communication when people hold a conversation and listen to their headphones at the same time. “Conversations become shallower because I’m not absorbing all the information that my interlocutor is telling me,” says Niedeggen.
The other person may have to start repeating information or resorting to trivialities in order to keep the conversation going, and the quality of their communication suffers.
Simply wearing headphones, whether they’re turned off or not, signals to your conversational partner that you’re not giving them your full attention.
“It’s definitely the wrong symbol when it comes to indicating how you value people,” says Niedeggen — comparable to continually glancing at your mobile phone.
It’s also a question of manners, says Patricia Fitzpatrick, who teaches at the Etiquette School of New York.
“If you respect the person you’re with, you take your headphones out,” she says.
Indeed, headphones can be a good way of avoiding unwanted conversations, on planes for example. But if you want to have a conversation, they’re counterproductive. “Conversation has to be balanced,” she says.
Experts aren’t aware of any studies on the effect of people increasingly wearing headphones, but psychologists believe there could be possible consequences for children.
Recent research suggests that smartphones have a negative effect on parents’ sensitivity to the signals given by their children, according to Markus Paulus, a professor of developmental psychology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
It therefore seems logical that the distraction of headphones could also damage parent-children relationships, leaving children feeling that they have to vie more for their parents’ attention.
“Children will then show increasingly risky behaviour in order to get their parents’ attention,” says Paulus. The trend isn’t just affecting parenting, but also creeping into the bedroom.
Technology news website cnet recently published an article with the headline, “Please stop leaving in Apple AirPods while having sex.”
According to the report, a US online ticket seller recently surveyed its customers and found that 17 per cent of headphone owners kept them in during sex. – dpa
