thinking about airpods
the illusion of choice
If you’re like me, you put your AirPods on the moment you leave home and walk anywhere.
I moved to New York City last week, and this is the first city I’ve been in where I don’t feel like putting my AirPods on while walking around. There’s already so much to absorb and listen to, why would you silence that?
This got me thinking about AirPods.
It reminded me of these lines from A Tale of Two Cities:
every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
There’s something interesting about how each of us experiences the world in our own way. You and the person walking next to you might both be walking on the same street, but you’re plugged into different songs or podcasts or audiobooks on your AirPods, shaping your reality in that moment in entirely different ways.
This is a pattern I’ve seen with a lot of technology: technology enables hyper-personalization, allowing us to personalize the stimuli we expose ourselves to at a level that just wasn’t possible for humans before. In the past, most forms of media were group activities, like cinemas, plays, or sport. Today, media is increasingly individual: everyone’s streaming different things on Netflix and listening to different podcasts at the same time.
You may ask though: doesn’t this go against the increased sense of tribalism that we see in our world now? People seem to be strongly affiliating with and dividing themselves into groups on opposite sides of various issues a lot more today, be it political, economic, or technological.
And that’s where I think the vulnerability of technology like this lies. Each person assumes that hyper-personalization means that they have more control over the media they expose themselves to, but in reality, they’re just viewing media that’s been curated just for them through technology. Using media as a means of propaganda and influence isn’t something new, but what makes propaganda particularly dangerous today is the illusion of individual choice: we now think we’re the ones choosing the things we watch and listen to, making us much more likely to associate these things as a part of our identity.
I hope we see platforms in the future that actually bring choice to people, not just an illusion of choice. Until then, hopefully the next time we plug in our AirPods, we think a bit more about being intentional with the media we consume.