considered listening to be so much more important than looking that his probationary pupils, or akousmatikoi, were required to sit silently and listen to their teacher deliver the lectures from behind a screen so that their eyes did not distract them from the most fundamental channel of communication: sound.
But today, the premium on careful listening is greatly diminished. We can check the book, listen to the recording or watch the video. There is growing debate about the value of teaching any facts at all to children, since almost anything can be discovered or checked on the Internet. We simply don’t have to listen as carefully as we once did, because the cost of not listening is far less than it once was.
As we discussed in Chapter One, writing is the hare to the tortoise of spoken communication: this relative newcomer has quickly overtaken speaking, to the point that millions prefer to text, email or message than to speak. As the skills of speaking and listening are undervalued, they are not taught or tested in school; as they are underused in social, business and political interaction, they fall into disrepair. The result is the erosion of accurate expression and reasoned debate, and the rise of soundbites, bombast and polarisation.
HEADPHONES
Like most pieces of technology, headphones can be used for good or for ill. Let’s consider the upsides first, of which I think there are 4.
I use noise-cancelling headphones on flights and they do an excellent job of eliminating the debilitating sound of wind rushing over the fuselage at 600 mph.
At home, I very much enjoy listening to music through high-quality headphones, which do give wonderful value: you have to spend somewhere between 20 and 100 times as much to achieve the same quality of sound through a physical hi-fi system, so audiophiles with a limited budget are well advised to choose headphones, as long as their listening is always individual.
In places with negative or distracting sound, headphones can be the only way to get some peace if you are trying to concentrate or relax. The Sound Agency and Ecophon released a free app called Study some years ago for exactly this purpose, and it has proved very popular. It plays a soundscape specifically designed to help you work and mask any irritating noise without itself distracting you. It stops after 45 minutes to remind you to take a short break.
Finally, there is the thesis of Professor Michael Bull, aka “Professor iPod”, that many people wear headphones when moving around in order to gain more control over their personal environment. There is so much intrusion in the modern world, whether from pointless noise, from other people or from marketers, that it’s a natural and understandable response to disconnect by setting an aural no-go zone with headphones – the grown-up equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and humming loudly in order not to hear someone.
However, there are 2 major downsides with headphone use and they both affect communication negatively.
First, millions of people are permanently damaging their hearing by listening too loud, for too long. Most mobiles are capable of delivering at least 100 dB through typical headphones; even where mandatory default volume limits are in force, users can and often do override them. The recommended maximum daily exposure time to 100 dB of sound is just 15 minutes. It breaks my heart to think of the millions of young people who are listening at this level for hours a day. Noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) is set to become an epidemic; a 1998 study found that already around one in 7 American teenagers had permanent hearing damage, and I have no doubt the situation is much worse today. Hearing degrades with age, so we are storing up a massive issue where in a decade or 2 large portions of the population will be at best hard of hearing, and at worst profoundly deaf.
TIP: A simple rule of thumb for safe listening is: if you can’t hear someone speaking loudly to you from 3 feet away, it’s too loud. Also, buy the best headphones you can possibly afford. Poor quality headphones tempt you to turn up the volume in order to get that visceral buzz from the music.
Second, schizophonia. This is a term coined by the Canadian composer and writer Murray Schafer, who also invented the word ‘soundscape’. Schizophonia refers to a disconnect between what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing, which is absolutely what happens when you put on headphones for commuting, shopping or working. We’ve noted the beneficial, noise-blocking aspect of this above, but there are 2 common costs.
First, hearing is our primary warning sense and when we disconnect it we can put ourselves in harm’s way. There is a new breed walking the streets that insurance companies are calling ‘podestrians’, and it seems they are causing numerous accidents by stepping out in front of cars they don’t hear, which causes the driver to brake suddenly and get hit by the car behind.
Second, schizophonia destroys social interaction. Board any bus, subway or train and you will see a good proportion, possibly the majority, of the passengers wearing headphones. We may not speak much when commuting but we are at least sharing an experience and conscious of one another. With headphones on, that link is broken and our social spaces are fractured into millions of individual sound bubbles. In that situation, nobody is listening to anybody.
Think about your own headphone use. Make sure you are listening safely and that you have the very best headphones you can afford, especially if you listen for long periods or frequently. And be conscious also of the effects on your connections with humanity and especially your family, friends and workmates.
ALONE TOGETHER
This section is named after an excellent book by MIT’s Professor Sherry Turkle, a fellow TED speaker whom I met when she gave her TED talk on this topic. Sherry was originally a major proponent of technology, and in particular its capacity to bring us together in the fabled global village, where all of humanity is connected and understanding is naturally enhanced. However, her research has caused a complete shift in her perspective and she now believes that technology is disconnecting us and loosening traditional social ties, a position elegantly expressed in this book and her more recent one, Reclaiming Conversation.
Seduced by technology and especially social media, we have moved from a few deep face-to-face relationships to a large number of shallow, distant ones: the words ‘friend’ and ‘like’ have a rather different meaning today compared to 20 years ago. Much of our interaction has become text-based, and youngsters are clearly not developing the social skills to manage face-to-face communication well, or to develop the empathy that arises from practicing being receptive to the subtleties of voice and body language. Much of the time we are now distracted, our attention and consciousness somewhere else. I am often struck on train journeys by the paradox of a carriage that at first seems full of convivial conversation – until it becomes clear that all the conversation is with people who are not in the carriage at all. There is a covert rudeness, I think, in someone turning fellow travellers into non-people so that he or she can have an intimate phone conversation without any sense of embarrassment or awkwardness.
I call the syndrome of constant text-based communication through mobile devices and social media ‘personal broadcasting’. Twitter, Facebook and the rest are entrancing millions of people to believe that the world constantly needs to know their ‘status’. The balance between sending and receiving is tipping further away from listening, and it’s a vicious circle as the skills of face-to-face conversation wither, making it ever-more challenging to actually speak to someone and ever-more tempting to send them a text.
We may even become driven by a new social fear called FOMO, or fear of missing out – a desperate urge to check and recheck social media in case someone has tagged or messaged us, or tweeted about us. FOMO can become obsessive and even pathological, and it probably plays a role in the depressing picture of a family sitting around the dinner table, all looking at their phones. Research among teens indicates that much of their conversation (when it occurs in person) is about what they are seeing on their phones. This level of connectedness
