Marina Koren for The Atlantic:
Small, snug, and unyoked from laptop or phone, AirPods are easy to wear for hours at a time, without a second thought.
This, BuzzFeed News recently declared, is “Making Things Awkward for Everyone Else.” All-day AirPod wear can make social interactions clumsy and uncomfortable: Has the AirPod wearer hung up the call or turned off their music? The person on the other end of the interaction doesn’t know. Particularly in situations that require some sustained face-to-face communication—ordering coffee or crossing paths with a co-worker—wearing AirPods and ignoring others, intentionally or not, can be a jerk move, BuzzFeed News concludes.
But something’s missing in the lamentation over the Apple buds and their erosion of social norms. There’s actually a very good reason for wearing AirPods all the time, even at the risk of offending someone: to safely ignore street harassers… Leaving your AirPods in while ordering at Starbucks is rude, because the barista at the counter is owed some common courtesy. Wearing them on your commute to pretend you didn’t hear that nasty comment is not, because the harasser isn’t owed anything at all.
This behavior comes with a societal cost: Sometimes, the stranger trying to get your attention, mouthing muffled words and miming removing the buds from your ears, just wants directions, or to ask some other benign question. But for many people, the desire to avoid a bad experience, the need for some self-preservation, wins out.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, the pastoral joys of city life (not to mention the nearly total erosion of manners in far too many people over the past several decades).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
My biggest peeve is sunglasses inside my business while I am trying to answer their question. That being said, be careful to monitor your ear health. Plugging them up for extended periods can change the normal environment in the ear and may lead to infections of the outer ear.
Nonsense. People wearing hearing aids don’t get ear infections from plugging their ears up.
But hearing aid users DO have higher risk of both fungal and bacterial outer ear infections. Because they are plugging their ears up.
You should check your facts before writing to the internet. All it takes is a simple Google search.
Yes, to stop those street folks is why I’d wear them out. Even in an Store, I’ve had people who hang out there come up and it becomes obvious that they are not there buying, but waiting on us “affluent” (LOL) customers to try and get something from. In SoCal, it happens enough to me that I stopped going in mostly, but when I do, it’s AirPods minimally.
Yes rudeness is just plain rude.