I took my dog to the park today. I was wearing headphones. My dog caught sight of another dog and they started running around together. The other dog’s owner, a man probably in his 30’s, was wearing headphones too. We smiled and nodded at each other and then sort of drifted around the park at a slight distance, following the dogs, listening to our separate noises. This happens very frequently when I take my dog to the park: two of us sort of orbit one another, not speaking, listening to different sets of sounds.
After a while, it struck me how bizarre and, honestly, dystopian this was. It seemed an insanely rude way for two human beings to treat one another. It was a gorgeous spring morning. I could faintly hear birdsong through my airpods. My dog was sniffing the bluebells and dandelions and trash, completely immersed in the sensory landscape of the place. I realized I wanted to also be immersed, too. I took the airpods out. Instantly, I could hear the birds singing and the wind and the clanging of a construction site outside the park. My other senses also seemed to come back to me. I smelled jasmine, I noticed the color of the sky and the mannerisms of the other people in the park in a way I hadn’t before. The other guy didn’t take his headphones out, and I don’t blame him. In London or New York, a huge number of people, including me, walk around with headphones in frequently.1
It’s common for both young and old people to fret about our phones, about social media and screen time. We’re hooked on our devices even though our data is getting sold, our sleep is getting worse, our interactions are getting more hostile, our elections are getting compromised. These are frequent (and valid) concerns. But, for whatever reason, you rarely hear anyone discuss headphones in this vein. To do so feels uncool and crotchety and weirdly retro.
I don’t know why this particular technology is exempt from our normal bitching and moaning about screens and the internet and email and the rest of it. It might be partly just that it’s been around, in some form or another, for a while. Also, as a culture, we tend to be slightly more visually-oriented, and to pay less attention to the importance of sound. Finally, there’s the straightforward fact that most of us enjoy what we’re listening to with our headphones. I like music. I like podcasts. I like voice notes from my friends. While my phone and laptop screens feel like dreaded symbols of social and professional obligation, headphones usually represent leisure, a chance to squeeze in something useful or beautiful while I’m scurrying around the neighborhood buying groceries or whatever.
Besides, people have always complained about new technology. People have always complained that the world is going downhill because kids are addicted to their phones, or TV, or the radio, or jazz, or whatever. Often, in conversations about how some new-ish technology is bad for us, someone will start quoting Plato’s Phaedrus. In Phaedrus, Socrates (well, Socrates as imagined/remembered by Plato) frets that the spread of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls,” edging out memory and making people reliant on the tool of the written word. It’s taken for granted by most people today that Socrates’ argument is ridiculous: obviously, writing and literacy are good, and obviously, Socrates was engaging in a sort of nostalgic fallacy. The takeaway is supposed to be “if we complain about new technologies, we risk sounding this stupid to future generations.”
But I’m not sure, really, that this is my takeaway from Phaedrus. Maybe Socrates/Plato was right. Yes, we’ve gained an unfathomable amount from writing and literacy and print culture. I’m the last to say otherwise—who would I be without the written word? More to the point, how would our society even run orally? It’s unimaginable.
But of course we lost something in this trade. The thing we lost was real and it mattered and it is gone. The worries Socrates shares in Phaedrus offer us the tiniest keyhole glimpse at a disappeared world. I wouldn’t choose that world over the one we’ve got. But still, it’s not as if nothing has been lost.
Before mass literacy and print culture, people employed powers of memorization we can scarcely imagine, internalizing vast amounts of information, making it part of their internal world. I have physical books scattered across the landscape of my apartment, but once upon a time, it would have been more common to construct mental landscapes made up of words: using mnemonic devices like memory palaces, memorizers were able not merely to recite texts but to rearrange them, remix them, skip around inside them like a person pulling books off a shelf and leafing madly through. The barrier between text and reader and writer was not so solid—less barrier, maybe, and more web, weaving them all into symbiosis.
Before books were cheap, monks and scholars might travel for days on end to reach a single available copy of a precious text, and as they read it, they would make the book a part of their mind. They would memorize the words inside, to refer back to later or share with others later. I have read many, many more words in my life than most living humans in history; you have too. But I remember very few of them. I cannot “read” from the library of my own brain. Even the texts I love most in the whole world are external to me rather than incorporated into me. I am privileged that this is the case, that I can have hundreds of books in my own home. I am privileged to be able to read and forget. But the fact remains: a whole world is gone now.
I asked my boyfriend what he thought, whether he was ever bothered by how everyone walks around with headphones on all the time. “I feel like people don’t really sing to themselves so much anymore,” he said. “People used to walk around and hum to themselves. People used to perform for their friends a lot.”
Growing up, my family had a joke: if you can hear dad playing the piano, it means you’re running late. While me and my four sisters and my mom were running around taking care of our obscure feminine rites, straightening hair and borrowing dresses , my dad would take the opportunity to sit down at the piano, playing the same few bars over and over again as he learned a new piece. He is not a professional pianist. He’s just a guy who loves playing the piano and practices whenever he has a minute or two. I could, if I wanted, listen to a perfect, famous rendition of whichever piece he’s practicing, played by a brilliant trained musician. And yet, when I listen to him play, I get something I do not get from listening to that brilliant trained musician on Spotify. Last time I was home, I walked into the house and saw him sitting beside my two-year-old niece at the piano, plunking out his music down on one end of the keyboard while she banged the lower keys with her tiny hands. I almost cried.
I am not trying to make the sentimental, Romantic argument that art is better or more authentic or heartfelt when it is produced by a non-professional, because I don’t believe this to be true. Rather, I am trying to pinpoint something specific that goes missing when we replace most of our live-performance experiences with recorded ones, experienced in isolation. The missing thing is reciprocity. My father plays the piano, and I get a message: hurry up and put your shoes on, you’re late. A toddler sits next to him on the bench and he adjusts by a few octaves, scooting to make space. This is a huge part of why we bother with live music at all: a live gig or a concert is not a one-way performance, obviously, but a collaboration between a crowd and a band or musician. It is a relationship, built up over the course of the night, with the audience speaking to the musician and the musician speaking back, not to mention the audience speaking to itself, fighting and dancing and spilling drinks and apologizing. Roger D. Abrahams, a scholar of the African American folk tradition, writes that oral folktales “often serve as roundabout techniques for talking about how one person is acting with others in the community without having to call out anyone’s name.” We see the same thing in a Jane Austen novel, when two eligible bachelorettes battle it out in competing turns at the pianoforte, passive-aggressively comparing their musical abilities. In other words, live performance is a give-and-take between audience and performer, never the same across two tellings. It’s not even clear, much of the time, who is the audience versus the teller.
We live in an age of wonders. It’s a miracle that, while I take my dog to the park, I can listen to the voice of John Lennon or Amy Winehouse or Whitney Houston as if they’re right in front of me, as if they haven’t been dead for years. I can listen to the greatest music ever made, at will. I am not limited to the stylings of my family and friends, perched at a little piano or sat in a circle reciting stores. I can listen to the sound of a full orchestra whenever I want to. I do these things without thinking, without considering the cost, indulging in a magic that would have been off-limits to even the richest people in the world for most of history. And, still. Something is lost. A world is gone.
This isn’t true everywhere—it’s a lot less accepted in New Orleans, for instance. I suspect this has to do with a mix of each city’s size/walkability, the expectations surrounding small talk with strangers, and the centrality of live music to New Orleans social life.
There’s an article out there somewhere (I forget where) about headphones — noise-cancelling, especially — being a form of augmented reality. There’s also some academic writing on “ototheatre” that you might find interesting!
The film ‘Aloners’(2021) made me completely rethink walking around with my headphones in. In the film at many points the main character walks watching videos on her phone and although I don’t do that, when I listen to an audiobook or podcast I am not fully present. I still love my headphones but try to be more conscious. It’s nice to know someone else has been thinking about this! Also really recommend the film, it really resonated with me in a way no film about the internet and modern life has : )