“For about eighteen months, we have seen men, and sometimes women, wearing headphones to listen to music despite the noise of traffic”says the presenter Léon Zitrone at the “20 hours” of Antenne 2, April 18, 1981. “A fashion, yes, but which is perhaps not without consequencewarns the report. It is not a question of avoiding others the noise that one can make, but of avoiding oneself the noise of others. For psychiatrists, it is a more serious rupture than that of generations. » This is the time when we are worried about these antisocial practices. “If people were happy and healthy, they wouldn’t need Japanese prostheses”writes the priest Michel Guyard in a column published by The worldon December 6, 1980, in reference to the Sony brand, which had just invented the Walkman.
Forty years later, no one wears a Walkman anymore, but 4.9 million pairs of wireless headphones were sold in 2022, according to figures from the GFK institute (of which more than half in the last quarter) . And if there has been a generational break as Antenne 2 feared, with headphones and earphones in the 21ste century, it is now the youngest who seem to complain about the elders, who do not master the etiquette. “Can you keep your AirPods in your ears when I’m talking to you, please, bastard?” »sings the rapper Orelsan in Cleantitle released in 2021.
Until the early 2000s, the question of whether you could talk to someone who had busy ears did not arise: no one talked to those who had wired headphones in their ears. The white threads of those of the iPod, launched by Apple in 2001, were also the most visible on the advertisements. From 2017, the Apple brand AirPods (more than half of sales) and their rivals changed all that. “I’m sure I have kids with headphones in progress under their long hair”admits a high school teacher in Saint-Etienne.
Unwritten rules to master
Soon, the man without earphones will no longer have to worry about whether or not he can engage in conversation, as unilateral and discretionary management of exchanges could become the norm. “The significant headphone trend is technologies that offer the choice to isolate or notexplains Joseph Batellier, audio product manager at Sony. Among these is the “Speak to Chat” feature which, after recording the user’s voice, pauses the music and noise reduction when the user engages in conversation with someone. » In summary, whoever wears the headphones will still have control over the openness to the discussion, deciding whether to immerse themselves completely or not, and to get out of it whenever they want.
You have 37.59% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.