[adsteel_]

That's my memory as well. Early '00s, I was also in college and seemingly one year campus went from a broadly friendly, social place to one with a lot of people, headphones in, focused on their own little world.

There were Walkmans and disc Walkmans before that, of course, but MP3 players were a step change in social isolation, from my perspective. Bluetooth earbuds + a wave of streaming audio content have been another.

[conductr]

The time after I left campus life in mid00s was relatively normal until the AirPods came out then everyone everywhere started again with the headphones in most of the time, it’s been that way since.

What I find interesting is how there seems to be some people that also are just always on the phone talking in public. It’s either a headphone call or often complimented with the handheld FaceTime. The forced eavesdropping I am subjected to makes it sound like nothing important is being discussed. Reminds me of my land line calls as a pre/teen where we just spent hours on the phone with a friend and basically had nothing to say, maybe we watched TV together and commented about the show.

The phenomenon seems much more prevalent in certain demographic groups from my totally nonscientific observations and I find that interesting as well. From what I can tell, in jest, black women are not capable of grocery shopping without being on the phone with another person (and not talking about shopping list items).