A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There was a time when the height of audio sophistication was a single white earpiece connected by chord to your transistor radio, so that you could just about make out the medium wave music coming over the air all the way from Radio Luxembourg.

Now you can buy ear buds – connected to nothing but your lugs – which have surround sound stereo on tap, and something called noise cancelling which takes away any external audio distractions.

Up to recently I thought that was a marketing gimmick, but I was recently the grateful recipient of a pair of said ear buds – and as soon as you put them in your ears, the world around you goes strangely silent.

Which is a marvel of modern science – particularly if you’ve lived from a time when in-ear audio looked like those hearing aids that were attached to a receiver that took up a pocket in your jacket.

Headphones have been doing this for some time of course, but there’s nothing discreet about wearing giant audio earmuffs as you go about your business.

The downside of ear buds is that more and more people think you’re talking to yourself.

The other aspect of sophisticated personalised audio equipment is that it removes you from the reality of the world around you, which is a good thing if you want to hibernate in clear sight.

But it’s a bad thing in terms of losing awareness of what’s going on around you – which is what prompted the Mayor of New York to issue a warning to commuters in the Big Apple recently.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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