Oh How I Need My Headphones

1.

I don’t think there’s been a recent technological advancement that’s been as influential and widely adopted as the Bluetooth headphone. It is fascinating to think of the progression of their mass adoption. The rise of new technologies frequently create an ‘eruption of feeling that overpowers reason’ (Mosco, 2004). I still remember when the AirPod came out, and was supported by a wave of almost envy-laced ridicule. Remarks on how easy it would be to lose them dominated discourse, but there was still that predatory eye contact towards the dazzling distraction of this new technology. These jokes and criticism directed to new technology hinges on the fear that it won’t be as good as it is advertised, because we are so desperately seeking for something metallic and new to improve our lives.

This previous sentence in of itself is ripe for criticism, and is a product of a neoliberal consumerist society that equates happiness with consumption—especially to shiny new technology. But criticisms of new technologies that potentially have this life-improvement possibility always opererate alongside this consumerist fear. What if it could make my life better? Even if it was just in the most minor and miniscule of ways. Oh how I would like my life to be better in the most microscopic of ways.

2.

But it is the ways that an isolating-technology that mutes away the outside world—giving you the power to mute the city and the life that’s passing you. Rendering life itself into silence. You’re shifting the experience of life itself to one of a mute observer. You hold a deeply emotional and loud inner life, but you withhold that, determining that this is a gift for yourself, allowing it to ring through your head until your ears also begin to ring, following suit. And when you run out of battery or forget your headphones, forced to go out into the world without your trusty earsidekick—you struggle to hear what life itself sounds like. You struggle to feel part of life itself, an alien in your daily routine commute.

You experience something much like a phantom pain, ghost ringing, the tinnitus of Christmas past haunting you from its absence. Life alone is just not as fun without your headphones. Especially when everyone in public wears them, you’re a pariah because of your lack of conformity. You fucking idiot, should have charged your AirPods. The anti-social act becomes the societal act to conform to. Even in lecture halls it’s not rare to see airpods in, the very act itself is to turn what is physically experienced into the background, casting your phone or laptop into the foreground now is all that matters.

The only things felt are the muted little reverberations one feels off of the ground, the wind, and the bus window rumbling against your leaning, tired head. We have won domination over the sensation of sound, and are simultaneously sold to us via the pitch this very pitch. Control is inherent to the advertising of headphones, even if the selling of said control is inherent to the field of advertising as a whole. We are deeply numbed by the advancement of headphone technology, I return redundantly to McLuhan’s point on the dental drilling device Audiac as a tool that allowed patients to self-soothe and numb pain through intensifying the level of sound. Drowning out pain and feeling in a sensory overdose.

This is the feeling of being withdrawn from what was once habitual use. What will probably always be habitual use. I wonder to what extent habitual denotes a casualness, even if it does imply that it is almost routine. But when it becomes integral, when it becomes — in a way — addictive, then habitual no longer becomes an accurate term. When the lack of a technology makes its absence felt, that is the mark of its hold over the user. If the weather app were to shut down I would not just lose a (self-determined) integral tool (which really is not integral at all), I would lose one of my addictive digital-pills that I swallow routinely throughout the day.

3.

There’s a reason why we all kind of have a shared rejoice when Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter shuts down. Because I think to an extent, we understand that they have entrenched themselves so deeply in our lives that we need their failure—their own disappearance—to finally stop using them. It’s so frictionlessly accessible that why wouldn’t you just shuffle along and continue use them. You’re pushed by social means, emotional means, and, most importantly, boredom to use them. But boredom is a scale, boredom is a tolerance that you yourself push higher or lower based on your habits. Based on your ways of combating boredom. And we are oh so pathetic and unable to muster a willpower, because not being on these apps does have a negative social outcome to a degree. No generation has been as entertained as our current one, and this has been hand-in-hand ever advancing since the radio, drastically since the television, teased by the computer, and unleashed by mobile technology. Peaking in Genshin Impact.

And the generations that spawn forth, that are younger than myself, intertwine life and headphones in a radicalized process of higher frequency of use. This is not so much the boomer take that everything is better at X age. It was already horrible and harmful at X age, the extent of which is now radicalized to a much more pervasive level.

4.

I find it fair to compare the technology of a headphone to the technology of a computer mouse. Both serve as mediators and transmitters between humans and technology. But the Bluetooth headphone is not as much a transmitter anymore; it makes the connecting cord invisible. Instead of seeing ourselves attached to technology, I feel that when we utilize Bluetooth technology, we are more likely to see ourselves as becoming one with a technology. Not understanding it clearly as being dominated by technology, but that is the process that begins to happen. It is not necessarily cooperation between man and technology, or even us instead instrumentalizing technology for our own benefit. Instead by having an invisible connector between man and tech we are more likely to adapt to it, then for it to adapt to us. While simplistic, you’re the one that has to fix and make sure your technology works for you, calibrating and troubleshooting to make sure everything works. You are the worker labouring away for the master, no different from a Roman slave washing the feet of a Princep. Who, if angered, will crash or break, maybe best case demanding a new update—or, a new expensive purchaseable-in-4-easy-payments upgrade.

The old-timey cord that was used to bridge headphones to phones’ intention was to connect, but via this connection it more importantly established the distance between humans and tech. There was always a visual and physical distinguisher between the two. You had to put your headphones down while walking away from your laptop or computer, you had to seperate yourself from the source. Now the source follows you the way one probably imagined God to communicate. Sourceless but domineeringly loud in one's own head, and in no one else’s. I’m not religious (only vicariously catholic), but I’m sure the feeling one gets listening to a sermon on YouTube, played through Bluetooth headphones —maybe even with the spatial audio turned on—comes away with a much stronger tie to what they are consuming. A heightened, more felt experience. A religious experience.

The name headphone is blatantly apt. More apt than when it was colloquially interchangeable with earphone. We’ve changed what we want to be stimulated, just the ear feels unsatisfactory compared to the stimulated head, encompassing all the means of perception. Ear, Air, Max, Beats, Wireless, Head, Phone: all deal with themes experiential and technological, and the physical features of the body. It is the ultimate immersive technology, it makes technology dominate. Everyone from Truax to McLuhan acknowledges the role of sound, it is the very vessel through which media technology needs to allow itself to be consumed in a truly immersive and dominatory way.

I’m sure one day, the range of which we can leave a phone or computer behind while our Bluetooth headphones still work will be increased en masse. It is also more likely that as the tech advances, you’ll be able to operate your headphones much like your own phone—which is much more possible than vice versa.

And as I step outside of my negligent dorm environment to spend an exaggerated amount on my MySparkle laundry card, perhaps my AirPods can continue playing a YouTube video that I am only half listening to all the way back in my dorm as I load my whites and blacks peasantly into the same washer. The only worry I have is if I left my Airpod case inside one of my jacket pockets, finding itself whirling and tumbling in the wash. But thanks to Find My iPhone at least I know it’s in there.