ambient individualism
The Rise of Public Audio Use
There is a trend that has become increasingly visible, or audible: the growing prevalence of speakerphone conversations and videos played aloud in public spaces.
We are witnessing the erosion of normative behaviors and the weakening of structure once maintained by social enforcement, such as the glare, shushing, the shared sense of what is appropriate.
As media rituals change, so do the rules that once governed public behavior. The shared etiquette that framed public listening as an intrusion is giving way to a fragmented cultural logic in which individual preferences override the collective agreement.
What was once the domain of private consumption through earphones is now projected into the open. This behavioral shift reflects more than just convenience or technological change. It marks a deeper transition in how media, identity, and space intersect.
From Private to Ambient Media
The earphone once represented an inner world, cordoning off individual experience from the surrounding environment. This started with the Walkman - which turned every listener into the main character of the movie of their life. But today, media consumption no longer respects such boundaries. Smartphones function less as private tools than as portals that leak personal content into the collective space. This phenomenon can be understood as ambient individualism, or the projection of personalized media habits outward, with little regard for the shared sensory environment.
The Collapse of Spatial Boundaries
The act of playing a video out loud in a store or on a train is not simply a behavioral quirk. It is a spatial collapse where private content becomes ambient, and public space becomes a patchwork of overlapping personal broadcasts. Traditional cues that marked the line between public and private, such as a newspaper, a phone booth, or headphones have faded, replaced by mobile devices whose design favors immediacy and constant accessibility.
Algorithmic Performance and the New Social Signal
Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram have restructured the way users perform identity. Every interaction carries the potential for visibility. Watching or playing content aloud in public can operate as a form of social signaling, not necessarily to others present, but as part of a wider performance of digital belonging. We simply care more for the digital experience than the physical. Public audio, similarly, becomes a mode of being seen and heard as someone who is engaged, current, and present.
Echoes of the Ghetto Blaster
The contemporary phenomenon of public audio also has a cultural lineage, perhaps most best represented by the ghetto blaster in the late 1970s and 1980s. These large, portable cassette players were not only a technological innovation but a symbol of cultural assertion, especially within the emerging hip-hop scene. In an era where access to mainstream broadcast channels was limited, such as cable TV, or even considering that hip-hop was non-existent on MTV, the ghetto blaster allowed marginalized communities to claim sonic space, to make their music heard in public without mediation or permission.
Unlike today’s ambient media habits, the ghetto blaster was explicitly performative. It was both an amplifier and a presence, a way to occupy a space, to define territory, to declare identity through sound. Hip hop artists and fans used it to turn sidewalks and street corners into stages, creating a media ritual rooted in volume, presence, and defiance.
This historical resonance complicates how we interpret today’s speakerphone culture. While the ghetto blaster was a tool of empowerment and subcultural solidarity, contemporary public audio often lacks that collective grounding. It reflects more individualized, fragmented performances, shaped less by communal resistance and more by algorithmic suggestion.
Post-Etiquette Media Rules
Public audio use can be read not as merely rudeness or carelessness, but as part of a broader transformation in how we occupy and perform in shared space. These behaviors were once media rituals that were repeated, socially coded performances that structure our relationships to others and to ourselves. Now, in place of discretion, we have a culture of ambient assertion. In this new order, visibility and audibility are not side effects of media use, they are simply discarded like litter left for others to deal with.
