Why Jo Ellison Is Wrong About Why I Wear Noise-Cancelling Headphones

I went in to the gym Saturday morning and picked up a complementary copy of the FT. I read it Sunday. This bit of improvised twaddle from Jo Ellison caught my attention...

While the presentational parent [reading loudly to her child on the train] assumes herself to be worthy of an audience, to shut out the world around you assumes a different kind of arrogance - the kind that suggests nothing worthy of attention. The noisy adult on the train is a violation of one kind of social contract, the one in which we consider out impact on other people’s lives. But the widespread use of [noise-cancelling] headphones symbolises another social ill. The death of the community - where you are attuned to the nuances of life around you and moderate your behaviour to fit in.

Noise-cancelling headphones are worn by commuters and people who work in open-plan offices. Why offices? A fully-loaded commuter train is quieter (around 40-50 dB) than an open-plan office (around 55 - 65 db when it fills up). I have a noise meter on my iPhone, so I know. Regular commuters know not to talk during the journey. The newbies who do talk, bursting with excitement at what may be their annual early morning trip to the Big City, are regarded as public nuisances, whom we hope will get out at Clapham Junction and take their wittering nonsense with them. I wear noise-cancelling headphones because I prefer the sound of my music to the sound of even a quiet train.

I can’t work with 65dB of multiple conference calls and miscellaneous chatter. Especially when it has nothing to do with anything I’m working on.

In a modern open-plan office, each of us works on our own tasks, related at best by being two different parts of a “process” which nobody can help us with, because we are all specialists.

There are no relevant nuances of life around us.

It’s not that I am arrogantly assuming that there is nothing worthy of my attention: there is actually nothing going on around me that needs my attention.

Everything comes in by e-mail or whichever IM service we’re using this year. That is how the modern workplace is designed.

And on some days, I may be entirely surrounded by day trippers from foreign lands like “Marketing” who chatter away until they disappear into a meeting, and then re-appear to chatter some more before packing up their roller-cases and departing for the 16:25 from Euston. Or wherever.

My noise-cancellers are a valuable productivity tool at work, and a means of keeping me from dozing off and missing my stop on the train.

And for the ten thousandth time… Just how disconnected from the real world can you get than to think that a commuter train, over- or under-ground, is any kind of freaking “community”? Or a Starbucks? Or any other public place where people go in the expectation of privacy from the strangers at the next stool at the counter? If a man in a cafe talked to Ms Ellison, she would Tweet a #MeToo in an instant. These are not “communities”. There are no freaking “communities” except in the rhetoric of social workers and architects.

Ms Ellison concludes by saying: for all the shouting, no-one’s listening anymore

They never were, Ms Ellison. They never were.