Hearing the world through the fiction of headphones
Our Relationship with Headphones
We began by describing our relationship with headphone use. The majority of the class raised the point headphones are used to escape the chaotic modern sonic environment of the city. From my research about the neuroscience of the sense of hearing our amygdala responds to emotional activity in the brain which is extremely sensitive to sound therefore this explains the ‘sense of escape’ my classmates and I described.
The Walk Men Effect
A 1981 report by Philippe Sollers asks young people whether they are losing contact with reality because of headphone usage.
The attitude of the inquirer is a common one: people once lived happily in harmonious contact with nature, but with industrialisation and urbanisation, especially in recent decades, they lose that healthy relationship with the environment, become alienated and turn into David Riesman’s ‘lonely crowd’, suffering from incommunicability. The walkman, for such an interviewer, is taken as encouraging self-enclosure and political apathy among the young, under a structure of mass control.”
I agree there’s truth within this statement as today’s generation especially the young lives the new generation lives in a technological world which alienates people from each other and social interaction/connection, as social beings this dramatically affects our mental health. Pre-technological world people would speak to each other, and get to know one another which in return would receive dopamine from social interaction however in a technological world the dopamine is far greater when using mobile devices and others so we as a society now losing the ability to socially interact with each other and today’s society suffers from far greater social anxiety because of this especially my generation. The phrase “Lonely Crowds” was spoken ahead of its time.