This bridge paper explores how headphones serve as a type of garments that interrupt our senses and therefore affect our physical and social world, particularly by encouraging social isolation but also acting as a means to protect against cat calling.
HEADPHONES AS BOTH A BARRIER TOWARDS THE WORLD OF COMMUNICATION AND A SHIELD:
Clothing is an extremely immediate and consistent form of communication. Whether you spend hours picking out an outfit, or no time at all, you actively make choices of what to put on everyday. You’re participating in a larger system of instant visual communication made up of garments and accessories. In addition, you’re immediately telling the people that you pass by something about yourself, since it may be the only information about you they can collect in passing. Certain pieces of clothing open up conversation while others act as a barrier of human interaction.
Headphones can entertain us, occupy us, and remove us from the social world, but they do all of those things in an extremely private way. They can change our mood radically but that change only exists to us, in our personal sphere. While we may be enchanted and completely transported by music or podcasts, it blocks off any interaction we have with the people around us. Headphones are an immediate visual signifier to the public that you don’t want to communicate. On a larger scale when you see a train full of people with headphones on and everyone is in their own world refusing to interact with each other, it may no longer be a public social sphere, and instead a sea of personal bubbles. Headphones are a staple of any modern cities morning and afternoon commutes. But what does that say about our culture in a larger sense if everyone wants to remove themselves from public interaction? This tendency has become so normalized and ingrained into our routines that many other forms of it exist. Take for example hooded sweatshirts or cell phones, both things that immediately block us off to those around us. If you glance at someone with headphones on, you immediately feel less connected to them and rule them out as a option for interaction. It might be the loudest and most immediate form of communication that takes no communication at all. While headphones can act as a barrier from human interaction, they can also act as a shield. Headphones are a tactic and method of avoiding sexual harassment and catcalling that women use so often that I think they forget that they do. Through experience over time, a lot of women I know, especially ones who live in a city suit up in a way to face the outside. I’ve learned this over time that I need to take on certain routines in the public world to protect myself. It can sound dramatic but there’s also a lot of truth to it. In a city populated as heavily as New York, it’s possible to get cat called or grabbed an astonishing amount of times when simply walking five or ten minutes. Since this is a reality, I have learned defense mechanisms such as avoiding eye contact and generally keeping to myself so of course headphones play a huge role in this. Like I said before, they’re an instant signifier that you don’t want to communicate and you don’t want to listen. The message sounds loud and clear to the public and sometimes you need it to. You set up a uniform that protects you in every way possible and headphones are instrumental in this process. Because while it may be damaging to have an accessory a part of daily wear that is so disconnecting, in some cases it is necessary. In that sense headphones can act as both a barrier and a shield depending on their context. They are a part of an outfit but also communicate something much larger about our culture, it’s desires in the public sphere and also its needs. Disassociating within the social world is rampant whether intended or not and headphones is a medium in which this disassociating takes place. A form of communication through guarding oneself and choosing not to listen. No matter how much you think it through, we are all participating in a larger system of fashion, of dress, and of choices. Wearing headphones during our daily lives is also one of those choices.
Reflection:
1 & 2. What did you learn by completing this assignment? What did you do well? I doubt myself a lot when it comes to writing because I feel self conscious about the way I structure my pieces and my grammatical errors. I think that sometimes this makes my writing weak and blurs the actual claims I am trying to make. In this paper I was so excited about my ideas that I definitely didn’t spend enough time organizing and breaking up paragraphs so that is something I will go back and edit. But I also tapped into a whole area of research and writing that I feel really passionate about and learned that I can write about well. Studying gender and dress, and pieces of clothing as barriers instead of ways of communicating is extremely interesting to me. I also learned that my claims and the questions I’m answering really do matter in this paper. They speak to a larger theme of sexual harassment in our culture that many can relate to very strongly and others can learn from.
3. What could you have done better, and how might you apply this to future writing assignments? I could have definitely payed more attention to structuring my paper. I also could have paid a little more attention to small grammar things and went over my writing a couple more times. In addition, I think my ideas are strong and my description is good but I think I could have taken my description to another level and made it better as well.
4. How might your thinking in Seminar have influenced your Studio work? For our first re-purposing a garment project that we are working on now I chose a hat. A hat is definitely a garment that creates particular cues and interactions when you’re wearing it because it can shield the face and create distance. So this specific garment definitely effects communication. I think in the future analyzes headphones in this paper will motivate me to think critically about the way specific garments allow you to communicate with your setting and this is a thread I definitely want to follow in the future.
