Walking down the street or in shops, one encounters many young people who have earphones on or wear earbuds and seem to be far from the world. On the street, it is noticeable because their attention is more on what is entering their heads through the speakers than what is happening around them.
There has been much talk of late about how the streetscape of our towns and cities, not to mention our workplaces, have drastically changed since lockdown. But the biggest change, despite footfall finally starting to rise and working from home slowly tailing off, is the silence.
Peter Stanford, from England, writes in the Telegraph
It is not that we have suddenly become a more reserved country, or even that we have been struck dumb by the slew of problems that are confronting the nation and the world right now. No, it is the ubiquity of a generation of digital natives listening to devices in their ears that put them at one step removed for everyone else around them.
One could say that, as it were, the young have decided not to be too confronted with the real world. Even down to the restrooms or canteen(s) in companies, one finds a large proportion of workers glued to their smartphones, either following up with their digital friends or playing games but making no effort to make friends at work or in real life.
At the beginning of the smartphone, it was mainly the very young, but during the Corona period, many older people joined the younger generation.
Whether it be on public transport, in a shopping centre or in the middle of a bank of desks in the office, a sizeable slice of the 25 to 40-year-old working population is, thanks to their headphones, with us but not with us: no chatter in the sandwich queue; no rows over pushing in; not even a flicker of recognition and a meeting of eyes. For those like me whose heads are unadorned by any tech, it can feel like walking on to the set of some dystopian sci-fi drama.
Strangely enough, many of those youngsters are not aware of their asocial behaviour. Those millennials looking for flexible working opportunities in such cases do not see all the time the same faces, so they could have contact with different people all the time. Hot-desking and shared spaces with work benches, touchdown points or social hubs, where staff can work in a group or on their own in a more informal setting, are more attractive to millennials and generation X than old-fashioned rows of desks with fixed computers and telephones.
For those businesses that prefer to stick with a more traditional office layout, flexibility comes outside the building, by allowing staff to work from home or remotely. Such remote work gives even less opportunity to socialise with work colleagues. However, it should not be forgotten that social interaction is a very important element in being human and in providing well-being for the individual. Social interaction is something that gets pushed aside completely by those earbuds, earphones or headphones.
You may say a big start to that evolution was given by Apple’s chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, who recognised potential in the nascent personal media player market and commissioned Apple engineer Jon Rubinstein to create a product in keeping with Apple’s minimalist, user-friendly style. Small white earbud headphones became an iconic trademark of the product in Apple’s pervasive and award-winning advertising campaigns.
Those youngsters are not interested in older phones the workplaces offers. Millennials will expect to use high-quality, reliable and covetable products at work to match their home devices and choose to bring in their own favoured, newer and higher performing smartphones and laptops to use at work. Top-notch Wi-Fi is also a must for millennials, who will expect high-speed connectivity anywhere they choose to work, whether that’s at a set workstation, from a hot desk, outside in the grounds or in a meeting room.
With a very high connection speed, the younger generation hopes to be in touch with ‘them’ and what interests them directly all the time. Time does not play much of a role here, which is why we see several young people walking down the street while all the time we hear them talking on the air to someone unseen.
Alison DaSilva, executive vice-president of CSR Research & Insights at Cone says about the Millenials
“Millennials view social media as a place to curate and share content that reflects their values – and this generation is enthusiastic about showing how their work is making an impact in the world,”
Danger lurks – from the millennials cycling or e-scooting along with the headphones on, eyes open but minds firmly in another reality; or for the pedestrians halfway through a conversation relayed through pods or headphones and prone to stepping into the traffic at any moment because they are blanking out those finetuned skills an older generation has developed to listen out for traffic approaching from your blindside.
Looking at these young people, it seems as if we may assume that they have chosen to dwell in their own chosen lifestyle. Cristina Odone, head of the family policy unit at the Centre for Social Justice confirms
“When millennials spend so much time with these big headphones over their ears, it sends out a clear message that they are choosing to be in a world of their own.”
And that, she adds,
excludes everyone else, including their own families.
It is predicted that by 2027 half of the UK will own headphones, with current trends seeing half of that ownership concentrated in the 25 to 45-year-old age groups and just 12 per cent in the 55-plus demographic.
None of the users seem to think about the dangers of neither distraction nor hearing damage. The NHS offers official advice that such headphones used too much or with too much volume have the potential to damage hearing.
We each are born with around 15,000 auditory hair cells in each of our ears that are all we will have for the rest of our lifetime to transmit sound to our brains. And they don’t like being blasted out by headphones any more than they do being assaulted by massive banks of speakers at pop festivals.
If you follow NHS guidelines, you will wear your headphones for no more than an hour at a time, followed by at least a five-minute interval before putting them back on again. Yet with current research showing that the younger group of users in their late teens and 20s often have them on for up to seven hours a day.
Most important, though, the experts say, is selecting the right volume. It should not be above 60 per cent. Some models, aimed at cautious parents of younger children, have a built-in volume lock switch.
But we are convinced that a very different danger is also totally overlooked, namely the element of socialising. It is not just the physical damage to ears that should be worrying us.
It’s the less obvious cost of the social and human obstacles they are creating,
says Julia Samuel, psychotherapist, bestselling author and presenter of the Therapy Works podcast.
Headphones, she believes, have the potential to damage the emotional growth of those whose daily ritual as they leave the house is to put them on precisely at the moment when they could be engaging with the world.
“They are placing a barrier in the whole interactive and interweaving between mind and body,”
she says,
“because they limit the amount of input wearers are getting from outside.”
They can cause, she worries,
“a deficit of connection with those around you and leave you a little emptier and a little chillier”.
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Please find to read:
How millennials in the workplace are shaping today’s businesses
How headphone dependency is widening the generation gap
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