Headphone dependency is muting the office buzz

Most households have their small domestic dramas: minor skirmishes over dishwasher loading or recycling. In our house, it is headphones that are the issue. My partner loves his noise-cancelling earphones, and I am happy to be spared his politics podcasts, but the only way to attract his attention while he is wearing them is to stand directly in front of him, doing a little talk-to-me pantomime.

At home, it is a minor matter. But now headphones have crept into the office: instead of the industrious buzz of work conversation and banter, there reigns an eerily muted soundscape of tapping keyboards, the metallic fizz of headphone overspill, and disjointed fragments of video calls.

It is tempting to blame the pandemic for this shift in office dynamics. Working from home certainly sent us a touch feral; and re-engaging in person with colleagues whom we were used to encountering as mere constellations of pixels has come as something of a shock.

There are plenty of persuasive-sounding justifications for a retreat into the quasi-solitude of headphones. Most involve the mantra of “concentration”: the need to blank out the racket of an open-plan office in order to concentrate, or the supposed beneficial effects on productivity of listening to music.

Habits of solipsistic silence have crept up on us over the centuries at a pace sometimes glacial, sometimes disturbingly swift. Historians disagree over the date when reading aloud as a social activity gave way to reading in silence – St Augustine thought the silent reading habit of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, unusual enough to be worth recording in his Confessions; and as recently as the 20th century, solitary reading was regarded in some circles as anti-social: the bookish heroines of Molly Keane’s novels are forever being chased outdoors by their horsey, reading-averse mothers.

Headphones in the workplace are a comfort blanket: a way of insulating oneself against the hell that is other people.

Anxiety about the anti-social effect of headphones is not new, either. The launch of the iPod in 2001 prompted Liz Wyse of the etiquette guide Debrett’s to suggest that it was uncouth to leave in your earbuds when speaking to a shop assistant. Two decades later, she is patiently repeating the same advice about engaging with work colleagues.

In truth, the argument about using earphones as an aid to concentration is nonsense, comprehensively debunked by academic research. Headphones in the workplace are a comfort blanket: a way of insulating oneself against the hell that is other people.

But the gains in productivity that a sonic comfort blanket might afford are matched by significant losses – and not just the headphone-related hearing loss about which the British Safety Council issued a warning earlier this year.