Public Space Has Become Earbud Space
Experienced urban life without headphones is a good thing.
Photo: Amir Hamja / The New York Times / Redux
I have a new element on my mental catalog in fault and always hearing entitled What ruins New York now? In addition to these ordinary and eccentric plagues such as rats (real and metaphorical), sidewalk hangars, chourized politicians, neglects from dog poop, e -wish bikers – you have the idea – I include headphones. Just because they are bad but because they are everywhere. My non-scientific surveys lead me to conclude that 60 to 75% of New Yorkers make their itinerant, jogging, merchant and sitting with small electronic orbs wrapped in plastic pushed in their ears. Public space has become an airpod space.
The result is that few people we see in public are really there. Our bodies can be in a park or seated in a pedestrian square, but our minds are attached to an inner environment somewhere. A walk in the street these days means listening to a disjointed series of unidirectional conversations, led to high decibels. Being alone is not an obstacle to complain about the last outrage of a family member, to blame a child for having spent too much time in front of a screen, shouting in a wandering partner, advising a friend in tears, sending love to parents, I collect these extracts simply by leaving my ears unoccupied. Even if we are all conditioned to believe that companies and governments monitor each of our movements, street people shout their most private concerns in the conviction that there, at least, no one listens.
Being so complete connected, however, makes it almost impossible to interact with the people you see in front of you. Try to stop a passer -by for directions, ask for the name of a cute dog or make a joke on the fly. With luck, you could get a white Sorry? Smile but more likely an empty look. Sometimes someone will ostentantly draw the obstruction of an ear canal with a roll of the eyes and looks at you with an expression that suggests It is better.
The headphones have become the stereo chain of the pedestrian car, a kind of acoustic bubble paper protecting us from noise or chatter or insults and makes an experience of New York formerly fundamental: occasional interaction. The city’s public chatter helped Walt Whitman to form its rhetorical style. He went up on horses of horses open from top to bottom of Broadway, chatting with cups with cottages with names like Broadway Jack, Dressmaker and Balky Bill. For him, they were bards of the American working class, masters of the vernacular whose “declarations and escapades have undoubtedly entered the gestation of” grass leaves “.
I’m barely innocent here. I recently received a pair of AirPods for my birthday (thank you!), Replacement of a long line of cable predecessors go back to Walkman Days, and they are fantastic little gizmos. But I use them at home, not to kill music or podcasts or voices of other people in my brain when I am on the go. The city, I think, demands that I am alert – to my dog, to traffic, to the sirens, to the ads of the metro and to the distinction between normal erratic behavior and a threatening psychotic rupture. Of course, it is a personal preference. Walking is a good way for me to listen to my brain – to let thoughts jostle and frost, to replay embarrassing conversations, to enjoy good memories and to let scary fantasies play long enough to neutralize them. Music interferes with this process. But that it is true for someone else, dear reader, is between you and your psyche. Some people deploy sound defenses as a protection against harassment Or sensory overload. More objectively observable is the way in which those who sail in New York in their own acoustic bubble relates to the city itself. A private reading list is used to distract or Glamor the most commonplace passage in physical space. We can all be lorded in the video From “What was that”, Sashaying in the underground passage of the first avenue and coming out of a sewer through a man hole, while being wrapped in a lush pop rhythm. She wisely tears her headphones before climbing on a bicycle. But of course, that does not prevent music from emanating from his body – which is of course the fantasy that headphones promote: we are not only the protagonists of our own biopic; We are also marking it. Spike Jonze AD of five minutes for AirPods Double on their superpower: transform an ordinary truche down of the block into an apocalyptic drama or a summer scene into a group of choreographed group.
In the metro, 1981: the Sony Walkman, imported for the first time in America in 1980, presented the idea of personal stereo anywhere and began to gradually close the city around us.
Photo: Dick Lewis / Ny Daily News Archive / Getty Images
But if each of us moves to a separate soundtrack, then is it even to live in the city? Or to ask the question in another way: if all the space is private space, then what is the use of public space? Town planners are developing places with A variety of seatsFor example – coffee tables, stools, benches, bridge chairs, stands, corners – to accommodate a maximum range of groups and conversations. But most of these users just want to be left alone, so maybe we are doing it all wrong. Perhaps what is necessary, it is a range of comfortable cabins, so that urbanites can relax outside in collective loneliness, spared from the need to hear everything they have not preprogrammed.
And yet, I often suspect that headphones are a form of dependence and that many people do not really like the isolation they allow. Lorde’s video ends at Washington Square Park, where the singer summoned fans by Tiktok for an impromptu concert that the police closed for lack of license. When she finally presented herself, it was the culmination of a ultimate non-agricultural moment: a gathering, a expectation, hoping and dancing, everything to have an overview of the star and listen to the same music at the same time, together.
