Why Do People Use Ear Buds?

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Many people look at ear buds as just a way to listen to music, they fail to realize all the other things ear buds are capable of. Such as providing one with, what I like to think as the most important thing of all, an escape. When I am plugged into my ear buds I tune out the rest of the world. It is like I have no way of being distracted, I am in the “zone.” The Headphone Effect By Michael Richardson also refers to this alternate world that the person wearing headphones enters. The Headphone Effect talks about Baldwin’s invention of headphones. Nathaniel Baldwin was “tired of not being able to hear the general conference” Richardson wrote, “in the first years of the 20th century, Baldwin invented a sound amplification system in the form of a headset.” People were excited, as most people are with anything new, but of course with excitement came skepticism. People quickly became worried that this new invention was going to separate us from …show more content…

This lead me to wonder why, so as I walked around campus I paid attention to the students and when and where they would have their headphones on. I noticed that just as much students had their headphones on when they were walking or riding a bike around campus as they did when they were on the bus. However different times of the day seemed to affect weather or not students had their headphone on. When it was early in the morning or late at night when there were fewer people there seemed to be less people wearing headphones and earbuds, but when it was the middle of the day and there were more people there seemed to be an abundance of people wearing earbuds. Therefore, I think that spike in earbuds relies on the amount of people that are around, I think that people use it as a sort of defense mechanism(like I previously suggested), so they will not have to talk to