Antisociality and the Ethics of the iPod
15 January 2008 – 6:43 pm byA recent post on Julian Baggini’s blog considers the ethics of the iPod, and comes close to asking whether being antisocial is unethical (that’s certainly one of the points the comments thread picks up). So, is it?
It’s a light-hearted piece, but with a serious aim. Baggini considers British mainstream political opinion to be communitarian, or at least less individualistic than you might think, and has described Tony Blair as being influenced by that tradition.
I may be putting words into his mouth, but it seems to me that Baggini believes that communitarian instincts are much stronger in Britain than are liberal ones. It also seems that someone who thinks that might be wary of anything that seems to reduce our engagement with one another and isolate us; if we’re not especially liberal, that isolation could have undesirable results.
Here’s a purely anecdotal account of how I use my iPod. It’s possible that I’m not a very good citizen.
Before I got my first walkman I was as antisocial as I am today, and a good bit more irritable — at least on the train. That was because I found it hard to blank out the chatter and get on with my reading. I’m not one of those fortunate people who can hold two conversations at once, watch TV and read a book, or listen to Bob Dylan while programming; the languagey bit of my brain is single-threaded.
For me, when I’m out in the world, an iPod (or equivalent) is largely a tool for filtering out annoyances and replacing them with something more conducive to what I’m doing. It doesn’t make me more cut off from people socially, it just enables me to physically distance myself from people I have no social connection with anyway. If I forget my iPod one morning, I don’t start joining in with the mobile phone conversation going on next to me. I’d certainly receive a reprimand, and richly I’d deserve it too.
So in this case, the unethical attitude (if that’s what it is) precedes the availability of the tool to deal with it. You can’t blame the splinter on the sticking plaster. But I admit all this is a bit idiosyncratic and proves nothing. While it may ring true for some regular users of public transport, perhaps it seems downright grouchy to others.
Googling for “iPod” and “antisocial” today returned 267,000 hits, going back at least as far as 2004 and the first few pages containing many op-ed columns and blog posts about this alleged issue. Isolation, antisociality and the iPod certainly seem to go together in the contemporary psyche. When doing something I suspect might look “interesting” I’ve been known to wear headphones just to discourage people from bugging me. Headphones mean “I don’t want to talk to you”.
But I can’t quite make out why being in a public space would oblige me to engage in a social activity. If it’s okay to read a book in a library then it’s okay to read it on the train, too, so far as I can see. I understand that it’s not okay for me to read it while having dinner with my boss, or to ask Hamlet to keep the noise down while trying to read at the theatre, but those are for different reasons. And I understand that if someone’s having a heart attack in my carriage then I need to turn the thing off and do something helpful. “Sociability” is a matter of degrees, not a simple “yes” or “no”.
For me the nub is this. In many public spaces there are clashes of liberties. Say, the person sitting next to me wants to talk to his friend whereas I want to read a book. In the past, we couldn’t both exercise our liberties, and if we tried, I’d lose out (my reading doesn’t interfere with his talking). It was a case of might making right. Personal music players resolve the problem, preserving both of our liberties at — so far as I can tell — no ethical or political cost at all. That’s an unreservedly Good Thing. Indeed, I’ll push the boat out and say that’s Progress.
Anthropologist Anne Galloway has an idea-packed post about the connection between personal music players and social disconnection. The idea of being able to “opt in” to hear what other nearby iPods are playing is absolutely splendid. That’s almost exactly the opposite of wishing the idiot with the cheap headphones would turn down whatever tinny nonsense he’s listening to.
[Addendum: Other MP3 players besides the iPod are available, and the iPod isn’t (only) a music player. But “iPod” may be becoming a word like “Hoover” or, indeed, “Walkman” — a proper noun that’s becoming improper. It doesn’t even have a initial capital to lose, although I wonder whether in a decade people will talk about “ipods” instead.]
5 Responses to “Antisociality and the Ethics of the iPod”
The debate about ‘ethics’ has a nasty overtone of social engineering. Some people worry too much about how others should ‘properly’ behave. Personally, I don’t find iPods as annoying as loud mobile phone conversations, but in the long run it’s a question of social norms rather than morals, and we’ll all get used to it, the way Victorians got used to seeing ladies’ ankles.
The need to find mental space on public transport is more a function of underfunding and overcrowding than it is of a reaction to normal social space, but it can work both ways: it’s a common technique of aspiring writers to wear headphones with nothing playing, in order to safely eavesdrop on other people’s conversations and gather ‘material’.
By Danny on Jan 18, 2008
The laundry is a great place for me to use my mp3 player to escape, but the odd thing is that people will speak to me even though they can plainly see that I am wearing earbuds. I find it rude that they don’t at least signal to invite me into a conversation before they start babbling.
I tend to ignore them and go back to my book.
By Mike Haubrich, FCD on Jan 31, 2008
Hi Mike,
Thanks, that’s another great example of a situation where nominally you’re in a communal or public space but actually you’re engaged in a completely private activity: just getting on with a tiresome task and trying to use the time productively.
R
By Rich on Jan 31, 2008