Everyone will admit that coming out of the Covid cocoon was going to be liberating. And, indeed, it has been. We are now free to come and go as we please and enjoy the sweet taste and smell of liberty. Unfortunately, one freedom that seems to have been left behind is the freedom from the blaring of other people’s cell phone speakers. I am not quite sure when it all started – perhaps it was sneaking up on us all along and no one noticed until the public rushed out into the sunshine brought with it a different sort of viral infection – but 2023 seems to be becoming the year of the public conversation that is best left private.
Every day, and seemingly everywhere, one is subjected to the never-ending blare of people yelling into their phones and the scratchy echoing voices emanating in response. Holding them aloft – sometimes sideways to their ears – giving those within earshot a glimpse of the private and corporate lives. I first started to notice this on public transport, where you might run into whole families holding a facetime conversation that, if there is a positive in this, gets you thinking that your family is not quite so dysfunctional as you thought when there is a basis for comparison. What little did I know that this was just my initial glimpse of what seems to be becoming a world-wide pandemic for which there is no apparent vaccine.
Over the last week, I had a foretaste of this auditory apocalypse. In an airport lounge, I became privy not only to the colors of crayons that a woman’s grandchildren preferred but to the fact that one major bank’s customers are a royal pain in the you-know-what and should learn to appreciate what the company is doing for them – a sentiment that seemed to be shared amongst the two or three others in on the call (I am luckily not a customer of that bank and now I will never be). On the train from the airport, I had flashbacks to my teenage years as a rather chipper young lady become less than happy when her boyfriend told her he just wanted to be friends. Not satisfied that we did not know enough about her private life, this young lady proceeded to keep us up-to-date with not just her opinion of her dead beat boyfriend but to allow us to get the full Love Island treatment associated with the opinions of her girlfriends. My favorite of the day (all of this during one trip), was a rather smart man in a suit whose wife/girlfriend was particularly open about what awaited him when he got home. This led to one older gentleman laughing quite loudly and expressing his admiration at the keenness of this individual’s significant other. Who needs PornHub when the audio version is free.
This does not include all of the YouTube and TikTok videos, music, sports replays, etc. that kept me entertained non-stop in whatever public space I happened to be in. The cacophony seems to have no socio-economic, age, gender, ethnic/racial or locational link – it is like there is a US Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) is being applied globally to everyone wanting to pack some auditory heat.
Unfortunately, those using even quasi-public spaces – such as in airports, train stations, cafes or on buses and trains – have little recourse. Approach a member of the relevant staff and you get either blank stares or a pretty direct “it is not our problem”. In one case, the train guard I approached was watching open mike YouTube videos, so was not going to be very helpful. The 95% of the public not abusing the auditory commons are left to be both user/customer and police officer. Sure, you can politely ask one person, then another, and then another and then another to please use headphones or turn the volume down, but you do so at your own personal peril.
It is not clear why, all of a sudden, people believe that public spaces are their private space, particularly when it involves their attachment to their beloved electronic devices. Maybe it is sheer laziness with a helping of natural self-centeredness. Perhaps it is a post-Covid social brain fog causing people not to be able to distinguish zooming or facetiming in public versus in their living rooms. However, although it might seem minor, the failing of social norms is not dissimilar to other forms of bankruptcy. Similar to the lesson Mike Campbell conveyed in The Sun Also Rises, when bankruptcy happens, it occurs in “[t]wo ways” … “[g]radually and then suddenly.” It is time we have a right to be protected from senseless auditory encroachment and for those responsible for managing public and quasi-public spaces to take on a meaningful management of the auditory commons.
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