This morning I read this New York Magazine article about how, in New York City, public space has become "earbud space." The writer, Justin Davidson, posits: With so many of us opting to "plug in" to our own sonic experience, we are in turn collectively choose to opt out of the vibrant and dynamic city around us.
In other words: We're missing it.
As he writes:
"A private playlist serves to distract from or glamorize the most mundane passage through physical space...But if each of us moves about to a separate soundtrack, then is that even living in the city? Or to put the question another way: If all space is private space, then what is public space even for?"
So on my commute today, I decided to pay close attention to those around me.
Of a simple random sample of 60 New Yorkers on two subway trains this morning (the 2 train, and the R train), here's where things landed.
How New Yorkers Use Technology on their Commute
You'll notice right away that out of 60 people, the prominence of earbuds or headphone use is as prominent of phones without earbuds.
Put another way, 77% of people are using technology on their commute in some way. The other 23% are going without ("raw-dogging it," if you will). Of the 14 non-tech enabled commuters, 2 were reading printed books, 1 was reading a newspaper.
Technological Escapism
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that humans continue to find novel ways to use technology to escape the mundane (if not terrifying) parts of our actual reality.
Over the past five years, I've certainly noticed my own uptick in sporting bluetooth headphones while out and about in the city. For me, this started when my husband started to notice that I was getting really anxious on long taxi ride to JFK Airport, where I'd constantly worry that our erratic taxi or Uber driver were seconds away from a collision. I found that sporting headphones and listening to music took me away from that fear almost instantly.
This technological escapism increased substantially for me during COVID. When New York City shut down completely in 2020, I had a newborn at home, and it generally wasn't a pleasant experience to take my baby for stroller walks past abandoned storefronts. Plugging into bluetooth headphones let me, mentally, disappear to somewhere else, far away from pandemic times.
When I (finally) started commuting again, it just felt natural to listen to music on the subway, and the habit stuck. Nowadays, in a world without IRL coworkers, I spend most of my day in video calls, or in headphones, either listening to music to help me focus, or talking to people, from hundreds of miles away.
I'm not the only one. The web3 community latched onto this escapist mindset more so than most during those early pandemic days. Back while the rest of us were making sour-dough starters and gardening on our rooftops, crypto kids were busy world-building. Swapping out profile pics for NFTs, hosting hackathons in all-remote RPG-style spaces, rewriting their own fully onchain constitutions, and setting up elaborate conference circuits in far-flung cities all over the world. I'm so grateful to have gotten caught up in the zeitgeist of this much-needed community and camaraderie during some pretty dark days for the rest of us. But as I wrote about last year in, When IRL Isn't The Real World, there are downsides to this "bubble effect.
A Semi-Present Reality
A few weeks ago at ASU + GSV, the largest education conference in the country, I tried on a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses for the first time. What I liked about the model is the way the audio disseminated through bone conduction, rather than in-ear or "over the ear" applications.
When I used those glasses and tuned into a bit of live audio or AI-powered voice conversation, I didn't feel as disconnected from reality as I do when I wear my Bose headphones. I also liked the fact that I could still walk around the world, feeling like a tech-enabled citizen without needing to be looking at my phone every 30 seconds (to change the song, to toggle playlists, to ask a question about the weather).
This semi-present reality mode of using enabling wearable technology feels like a better compromise between what we have today (ie: people tuning out of society completely) and what we might have in the future (ie: technology serving as a little "helper bot" for everybody, on their own terms).
After all, there's a fine line between using technology to escape the world completely vs. using technology to enhance the way we enjoy the present moment.
