My Personal Party

Absolutely fascinating article by Jen Paton where she ponders the meaning - and ramifications - of listening to music players in public. Being someone that's constantly listening to music in headphones while working, while doing the dishes, folding laundry, and sometimes even as i drift off to sleep, i've never really questioned if this is a good thing or not. At work, its been more of a necessity as the noise levels in modern office cube farms can reach stunning levels and, since I'm without whatever gene you need to be able to ignore loud conversations that occur mere feet from you, I use music to drown out this noise so I can concentrate on what I'm doing. Since I do a do of writing, this means I listen to a lot of instrumental music, ranging from classical (Bach and Mozart are the best) to electronica (think Boards of Canada or The Orb) with a healthy dose of Booker T and the MGs. When doing chores around the house, I love making the chores go faster with tunes, and the added benefit here is that I really get to hear the subtleties in the songs. So vie never really questioned if this earphone listening was a bad thing. Paton, while not changing my mind, makes some good points, including:

You have to sit down to watch a film, devote your attention to it in a way that is conscious or half conscious. You have to choose to linger over a photograph or a painting. Music or spoken word is simultaneously less encompassing of one’s attention and thus more encompassing of one’s life, and has become, in little over a century since its invention, ever more intimate, moving from our living rooms to our cars to earbuds themselves. ...
By choosing music (or podcasts on anything from chess to Italian language to current affairs) to play in your ears, you change the message from inputs pointed at you to inputs you have chosen. ...
[Audio] represents a sort of personal branding of oneself to oneself... There is some heady hubris that comes from setting your life to music: banal moments acquire emotional heft, and one’s dash to get a sandwich at lunch acquires some extra swagger. It’s a feeling most of us, in the past, could’ve only enjoyed in a clearly public space – the club – or a clearly private one – the car, your living room. Taking that purely private pleasure in public, but in secret, is a relatively new thing.