This is a “get off my lawn” complaint, but virtually the only thing I watch on television is the news, and lately I’ve noticed it getting corrupted by social media. In short, the local news, usually devoted to happenings in Chicago, sports, traffic, and weather, is now devoting a large part of its morning programs to reproducing things found on Twi**er, Facebook, or YouTube. Now I like cat videos as much as the next person, but this seems a cheap way to avoid having to report on more substantive issues (e.g., the huge troubles with Chicago’s Police Department) and also to get reportage without having to pay reporters. And, frankly, at 5 a.m. it’s annoying.
Although the national news, constrained to a half hour a night (except on PBS) hasn’t yet been infiltrated by this stuff, I’ve noticed that they too sometimes report on what’s “trending” on Twi**er and the like. I use social media a lot (you’re reading me on it now!), but as news it doesn’t even constitute a survey of social attitudes—it’s just filler.
I can’t stop the juggernaught of YouTube + Twi**er + Facebook, and I do recognize their substantial merits, including their value in reporting real news in real time, but serious news shows shouldn’t be showing videos of bulldog puppies licking their owners awake.
Next time you’re on the train, notice what proportion of people are looking at their phones or listening to electronic music through headphones. As we become more connected to the world’s social environment, we’re getting more oblivious to our real environment: the one where we sit and walk. As Ram Dass said, “Be here now.”
Or maybe I just need another espresso. . .
Maybe the title of the post should be more like “Share this: How social media swallows everything”
😉
Sub
I couldn’t agree more, Jerry. I lose the will to live when I attempt to read a news story and am subjected to the 75% of it that is regurgitated from social media (which I choose to snub in real life). Even those of us who avoid it cannot avoid it.
Then don’t read The Washington Post because I swear half the pieces are half tweets by twits.
missironfistatheist<
"Lose the will to live"? If you are serious, that is absurdly over the top. If unserious, that's just a bit silly.
Yes, it’s everywhere. They seem to be more concerned about putting on a “show” rather than hard-hitting investigative journalism.
Agreed. This has bothered me for some time. In the old days, journalism professionals presented the news that they, in experienced opinion, was important. Now, news, especially the local news, has adopted a click bait approach that appeals to the lowest common denominator: entertainment “news”, and the twitter trends that you mention. It is amazing how prescient Paddy Chayefsky was with Network.
I think a large part of the issues with the news is when the news started being rated like other television shows. If your news people don’t hold an audience, they get replaced. If the news you are reporting doesn’t bring in an audience, find different news. The whole ‘public service’ side of the news has been taken over by ratings, commercials, and on-air personalities who are not journalists.
Entirely agree. Here (NZ) the contagion has spread to weather presenters, who think they’re ‘personalities’ too. You can’t get a straight weather forecast without constant time-wasting and annoying ‘folksy’ comments like “It’s going to be a fine afternoon, so chuck another sausage on the barbie”.
‘Just read the damn weather, you moron!’
cr
No, you don’t need another espresso. I totally concur with your views here.
As for people on their cell phones on the train (in NYC), I would say most of them are doing the same thing they’ve been doing for years: playing games. Crazy! People, why aren’t you reading BOOKS? (My daily reading of late has been Oliver Sacks’s “On the Move”.)
As for music, at this very moment (at work), I’m listening to Marc-Andre Hamelin’s 3-CD set of Busoni’s late piano music. I think it’s fair to say that NO one on the train is listening to Busoni or Brahms or Scriabin or… Well, that isn’t entirely fair. After all, some of these people may be Julliard students or faculty.
Yeah, I’m a bit of a snob. I won’t apologize.
Barry
P.S. When is it going to be considered rude and déclassé (and dangerous) to WALK while texting? You want to text, people? Fine. Sit on a park bench, lean against a building. But STOP it already with this walking-and-texting. Christ.
When I worked at BlackBerry the manufacturing building had a sign in the stairwell warning people not to text and walk up the stairs. Probably someone fell on their face doing this.
Excellent.
Was texting while descending considered OK?
Texting while walking in a public area is wrong (and dangerous). Sit the fuck down, people, to write your oh-so-urgent message or lean against a building for a moment to type your message.
There is, of course, this story.
While the report says ‘electronic device’, his mother says he was taking pictures. Well in that case, the incident is far from new. It is (or should be) a well-known hazard among photographers, from way before digital arrived.
Looking through the viewfinder, you feel remote from what you’re seeing, if it’s wide-angle things seem further away than they really are, and hazards seem less real.
I might as well confess one occasion when I was almost struck by an oncoming train for that very reason. I’m embarrassed by it, I was stupid.
cr
My thought exactly!
Nice!
I was on the phone to a Shell geologist from the rig one day, and convinced her that Shell’s house rules banned walking and mobile-phoning at the same time.
Cruel, but more morally defensible than pulling the wings off flies.
On a NYC subway this morning I counted ten cell phone users (I don’t know if they were playing games, but they were not talking on the phones) and one person reading a paperback book, out of about 25 total people in view.
I’ve contemplated carrying a porcupine with me as a defense against this.
Walking and texting? I’ve had people who ran into *me* and considered me the rude one for not noticing they were preoccupied.
HUGE agreement!
As soon as I see a ‘news” story appealing to tweets and social media posts for it’s content my regard for that writer plunges.
It comes off as facile and lazy. Yeah, I could get this from social media too, mr reporter…what is it you are supposed to add?
I agree with almost everything except the last paragraph – “Next time you’re on the train, notice what proportion of people are looking at their phones or listening to electronic music through headphones. As we become more connected to the world’s social environment, we’re getting more oblivious to our real environment: the one where we sit and walk. As Ram Dass said, ‘Be here now.'”
I used to commute on the D.C. Metro years ago before smart phones were mainstream. And even in that era before social media, hardly anyone talked to anyone else. I always had my head buried in a book or a magazine. I can’t imagine subways were that much different 100 years ago. Smart phones just add one more technology to allow us to pass the time on the train. And in fact, the people who spend it on social media are staying more connected to society than I ever did by ignoring everyone for the words on the page.
I think what was bothering me was not that people on public transport should talk to each other more, but that reading books or newspapers was probably a better use of time than scanning social media.
https://japanmax89.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/technology.jpg?w=300&h=262
I don’t think we should be worried about technology destroying social interaction or causing people to tune out of the “real world” or anything like that, Dr. Coyne, but I totally agree with you about the bizarre use of social media and other things like that on local news, especially when it’s supposed to be “hard” news.
I’m not even 30 and I’m inclined to agree. I’m too young to really appreciate news for what non-millenials claim it to have been, but the issue is that news seemed to be going to way of being less about investigative journalism, and more about basic reporting and commentary before the dawn of social media.
The problem with this approach is that, thanks to social media, this can now be done by anyone. Anyone who is at the event is only slightly less capable of reporting on it than a major news network. Commentary can be provided by any number of social media personalities that happen to be educated in the subject matter.
The news networks don’t really seem to be doing anything that requires full time journalists, and so they’re being replaced by social media. In an effort to get viewers back, they try to be the best social media ever, which means is a poor way to justify the paychecks of a major news organization.
They need to return to more hard-hitting investigative stuff, the kind of thing that people on the scene with phones can’t replicate. The problem is, this requires using facts the solve ‘controversial’ issues, which will invariably lead them to being declared biased.
The only solution now is to view several sources of news and do your own research to assemble the truth, but that can take a lot of time, and there are too many news stories for even news junkies to do this for everything.
As a result, people might take to not checking every side of an issue, just going to a singular trusted source. This encourages polarization of opinions. Which means any kind of fact-based investigative journalism will be declared ‘biased’, if it goes against their beliefs on a topic they simply don’t have time to fully check up on.
It’s a crap situation we’re in, and while there are ways out of it, the news networks don’t seem to be taking them.
What the Boston Globe did to uncover the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse of children is an example of the hard-hitting investigative reporting you are talking about.
I’ve been noticing the same thing for probably about three years now.
Going farther back, in the past five or six years, what gets deemed as newsworthy are stories that someone captured the video of. A car accident on the other side of the country gets coverage only because there is video of it. Twenty other accidents here in local area get no mention.
At the risk of venturing into “get off my lawn” territory myself, another news reporting trend that I find irritating is how they just have to show some kind, any kind, of video while reporting a story. If they’re talking about an airline incident, they show you videos of airliners taxiing at an airport, or flying, or videos of the interior of an airplay, or anything, even though none of that is specific to the story they’re covering, and doesn’t add anything to your understanding. It’s just distracting eye candy for the short attention span crowd.
I’ve noticed that. “If there aren’t pictures it didn’t happen”.
Also, the compulsion for newspapers, especially online ones, to have a picture – any picture will do – to accompany a story. If it’s a murder and they have nothing of the crime scene, they show a stock pic of a police car. If it’s a jet airliner with engine trouble they have a picture of a C-130 Hercules (yes, really). If it’s a suburban train that derailed they show a pic of a freight train from some other region. And so on… exactly as you said.
This is just *wrong*. As in, factually incorrect. It annoys me (quite unreasonably) that they are gratuitously spreading misinformation through sheer laziness.
On the subject of airline incidents, if they have no hard information, they interview some retired pilot who’s willing to give his opinion (= wild guess) about what might have happened. Or they ask passengers the same old predictable stupid questions. A minor unknown hero of mine is an attractive, 30-ish American woman who was approached in the airport forecourt by a reporter with “When you heard the plane was in trouble, how did that make you feel?” She just said “What do _you_ think?” and walked off – and I was cheering my TV. (In retrospect, I’m surprised the TV station actually ran it).
cr
And, if I may sheepishly add to the self of modern-life complaints, something going through my head more and more is:
ADVERTISING RUINS EVERYTHING
Yes, I know it’s a necessary evil.
But whatever it’s necessity…it has lead to evil.
There now seems no area of life that is not
intruded upon by advertising. No content that can be consumed on it’s own, without it being interrupted by advertising, or sharing space with advertising. Magazines have become almost unnavigable – so much of the most ergonomic, prime reading real estate is given over to pages of advertising I often can’t even find the contents page.
If I attempt to even listen to local commercial radio stations, I palpably feel valuable portions of life being drained away by being immersed in a phalanx of commercials, simply to experience the few minutes of content in between.
Can’t put on a DVD or Blu-Ray of my favorite movies without being forced to watch adds – trailers – for other movies…over and over.
(The fact we have to manually skip through them remains an insult).
Phone any company to which you are already paying for services, and you will be put on hold to listen to loops of their advertising for your efforts.
Advertising has practically ruined the web in terms of it’s intrusiveness…both in terms of ensuring that almost every web site is made garish by their inclusion, and just in ergonomic terms – wait through adds to watch videos, adds popping up to block content you are reading, adds crashing our browsers….and now including the nefariousness the way everyone is tracked.
Advertising’s reach has sullied so much experience in modern life it’s blowing my mind.
/RANT
(Next I’d rant about how “competition” now ruins everything…but back to the regular programming).
I’m amazed at the aggressive and slimy tactics on-line advertisers have adopted. Given the prevalence of touchscreens, they’ve taken to placing humongous ads that you basically can’t avoid touching while trying to scroll through an article. They also create ads that automatically redirect you to their website or their page in the app store. That’s more than enough bad behavior to make me blacklist their products. I don’t understand how these tactics can be successful.
(Clarification: by “automatic” I mean within seconds after loading whatever site you intended to visit, you find yourself whisked away to another website or the app store having touched nothing.)
Yes!
There are pop ups clearly timed for you to click them by mistake. For instance you click a link to a web page for a story, but you are only shown the top of the content and you immediately need to scroll to see it.
But just as you move your finger to scroll up a pop up appears cannily right where you need to scroll, and – zap – you’ve now clicked open their add.
Like most people I have a huge loathing of bullsh#t and it hardly helps that advertising depends on BS for it’s very existence.
Oh, for the days when “dancing baloney” was the worst of it!
No pop-ups in books! 🙂
I’m usually on my phone on the train reading & writing on WEIT posts but I don’t like other people I don’t know and welcome the isolation.
Anything Coyne is exempt.
One can always use another espresso.
Another measure of the decline of quality news is the impending closure of Al Jeezera America after only a few years in existence. I’ve come to respect it as the only relatively reliable source of world and domestic news in the US. When it began I would never have guessed that I’d say such a thing, given the reputation of A-J in the Middle East. But here they hired a bunch of quality journalists, many refugees from CNN, and let them do quality work.
I was probably one of the 5 people in the U.S. who watched this channel often and found it far better than just about anything else. They covered everything and everywhere. While CNN was giving us hours and hours of stupid politics, AJA was giving us actual news and reporting.
The deeper reasons for the truth in your posting is a couple of very important things and the one leads to the other.
No more regulation is first and foremost. The folks who regulate the business FCC, no longer do it. It falls in line with our supreme court and certainly with the republican mission. No regulation of anything.
This has allowed the corporations to buy up all the media they want. So the very few own damn near all of it and are then allowed to destroy it as they wish. One person who has probably written the most on this is Bill Moyers.
When the idea of monopoly is no longer a bad word and in fact is now common in this country you are pretty much done. We went through this once before in the early part of the 20th century but who cares about history. We are in the process of removing all regulation of just about everything. You can now get your news from the Murdoch’s of the world. You can fly on this airline or walk. You can buy our product or not. You are now entering the space of supreme capitalism.
Most television news, with the exception of a few stations such as PBS and the BBC, are part of the entertainment complex. This includes local news, network news, and cable news. Their goal is to get the highest ratings possible. Local news, in particular, is a total waste of time if you’re trying to inform yourself with the important news of the day. Almost none of it is hard news. Taking into consideration its emphasis on the murder of the day, other crimes and disasters, sports and weather, you are unlikely to get as much as five minutes of real substance. This is why I gave up watching local news many years ago.
If you want to understand what is going on in the world, read print publications or go to websites you trust. Otherwise, you’re just watching show business. In that case, you may as well watch Entertainment Tonight.
Check out how many American newspapers even still have foreign bureaus…almost none.
You may have just clarified something that’s been bothering me lately.
I’ve been enjoying “House of Cards” (the Netflix version), and was bothered to see Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, and Sean Hannity playing themselves, talking about the doings and such of President Underwood. I like Maddow to some degree (but not the other two), but that’s beside the point: Why are these people playing fictional versions of themselves that, as they appear in the series, are indistinguishable from their “real” selves? It’s a dissonance that bugs me, and your remark about us “just watching show business” might have nailed it.
I tend to agree that subways and trains and busses were probably not too different 100 years ago. They were probably full of people reading magazines and penny dreadfuls and comics and diverting their eyes from one another. What I think HAS changed is family interaction. I stopped off at an El Pollo Loco for dinner last night and saw a family of 4 (parents, 2 kids) seated with their meals and every single one of them was looking into a phone. I was in line for about 7 minutes and I swear I did not hear one word of conversation from them during that period.
There is a correlation between use of social media and the erosion of empathy. Somewhere, I saw a study revealing that though I had already begun to wonder that perhaps that might be the case some time ago when I read about s study showing people woo read fiction tend to be more empathetic.
But, as you observe, modern society turns out to be more like what Alpert’s partner at Harvard used to suggest: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
At least as far as electronic devices go …
Interesting. I’d never come across that. My first thought was the song Trigger Hippie by Morcheeba.
The opening lyrics of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” are adapted from T. Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience. It’s from the album Revolver, written while John and George (and to a lesser extent Ringo) were heavy into acid.
I stopped watching the local “news” when this began.
“And this morning, here’s what’s showing up on Twitter …”
Excuse me? That’s supposed to be news? What a load of horse hockey.
What is also terrible is that Al Jazeera, the one network that aired real news, is shutting down in a few months. Then all we will have is Twitter, bad lip synchs, and Cat videos.
New and different ways of doing things is an ongoing fact and it might be better just to have another expresso and let it pass.
It is an irony that you may be calling for information but not the sort you want is available by the train or bus load.. and as we all know, from anywhere on the planet
Raving on, what may have been general is now specialised information and it is those same tools found on the bus, restaurant, ferry that is going to give it to you, we all want it now and damned if I’ll wait.
When I want cash money, I bloody well have to use car and legs and go to a local bank, ATM my lap top won’t spit cash out, damn it! Yep,
leg work has given way to finger work and soon it may be just stick a probe to your head and stay in bed. And, it use to be a coffee would sit you in a chair but not anymore it is taken at 5.0 km/h (average walking speed) in a disposable cup whilst hanging on to that social interacting device.
Now to get this one off my knee and go outside before it gets to hot.
Worst of all, social media trend reporting is an excuse to spread rumors and falsehoods, turning quality outlets like NPR into a gossip rag bashing atheists.
For example, the story of an armed perp with a history of menacing his neighbors over parking disputes becomes an excuse to have Reza Aslan bash atheists.
This despite what his ex-wife, wife, neighbors, the perp, his social media, and the opinion of the police points to: a perp with a gun shoots someone in a parking dispute.
Here are the facts of the case, followed by what NPR reported:
—– E x – W i f e ——————
Cynthia Hurley, the suspected shooter’s ex-wife, told the AP that prior to their divorce 17 years ago, his favorite movie was “Falling Down,” a 1993 film about a divorced unemployed engineer who goes on a shooting rampage. “That always freaked me out. He watched it incessantly. He thought it was hilarious. He had no compassion at all,” she said.
——— N e i g h b o r s ————
Neighbors say Craig Stephen Hicks was a confrontational man who regularly harangued his neighbors about parking their cars in the wrong place and noise at the condominium complex in Chapel Hill. But they and his wife say his angry behavior did not include references of religious intolerance or racial hatred.
Neighbor Samantha Maness, a 25-year-old Durham Technical Community College student, said Hicks was difficult to everyone, regardless of race or religion.
“He was aggressive toward a lot of people in the community,” said Maness, standing outside the building where Hicks lived. “He had equal opportunity anger toward a lot of the residents here.”
Things got so bad, Hicks’ neighbors held a community meeting last year at the clubhouse in their Finley Forest neighborhood about his tirades because his actions made them feel “unsafe and uncomfortable,” Maness said.
The video of the neighbor under the text confirms the quote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2&v=4pZI_IP8sjc
———– w i f e ——————–
His wife said in CBS video(skip to 2:18), he “believed everyone was equal” “I can say with my absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do with religion or the victim’s faith. It was related to the long standing parking dispute”
—— N P R Reports —————
Then you get Mr. Aslan on, who knows nothing about the case, with no one representing atheists. The interviewer did not ask Aslan if Dawkins et al ever suggested killing innocent Moslems or murder of any variety for that matter.
NPR couldn’t consider the obvious: the family wants to believe they died for something big as martyrs for their faith, not because some nut with a gun picked a fight with a neighbor. All his neighbors were young and accomplished. He was twice their age and an abject failure. He felt inferior and then dissed and he had a gun and was looking for a chance to use it.
——————————————–
As you can see, the police did not believe it was a hate crime at the time and there are no such charges today. Local reporters did not come to that conclusion. It is not because the Bible Belt has turned into atheist lovers. They did what good reporters do: they listened to what the perp, his wife, ex-wife, Richard Dawkins and neighbors said. They did not interview Resa Aslan for his uninformed opinion and leave it at that.
[This comment should be read while listening to BRONCHO’s
I don’t really want to be social]
Media are not social, but the term social media makes for a good ‘hook’. My thesis is that the advent of nearly every new electric medium in the 20th century has led to
decreased social interaction. Why talk to your neighbors when you can be listening to Fibber McGee, or watching I Love Lucy, or playing Space Invaders, etc.
I suspect that after the widespread adoption of home radios in the 1930s & 1940s, that there were a lot fewer people sitting out on their porches on a pleasant evening chatting with their neighbors who were walking by. I can state for a fact that after the public adoption of television there were fewer kids out in the early evening playing street baseball, or hide ‘n’ seek, or doing a “group raid” on their neighbors’ fruit trees and berry patches.
So the advances in computing from the 1980s to the present, where the world can be held in your hand (i.e. a cell phone), is just a continuation of this trend toward
social isolation. Unfortunately, in the US, it has probably led to the stupidification of the populace, where in 2016 it is becoming increasingly likely that we could be looking at the people electing someone like a Trump to the presidency – but this is a whole ‘nother thesis.
OK. I’ll be the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. I don’t see the problem here. All those people like us typing away ARE being social. I have social relations every time I comment here. All those people typing away on their iPhones are interacting (usually) with other people. That is highly social behavior.
Agreed. And, if you’re being social on EvolutionBlog, or Preposterous Universe, or WEIT, you’re learning! A lot!
I typically agree with the things that are expressed in the OP, but sometimes I have to pinch myself and remember to loosen up. I’ve long despised local news anyhow. For a lot time they’ve been pedaling lots of crap for viewership.
I was reminded of my local news aversion today when the dramatic Packer football segment (I live in WI) made me laugh, sigh, and turn the channel all at once. Kind of entertaining really.
There seem to be quite a few of us Wisconsinites hanging out here at WEIT.
And you can’t get pregnant / catch embarrassing diseases from it 😉
Actually I agree with you.
cr
I’ve been without a TV for several years now. The last news program I saw was on PBS, and it was covering twitter back then. Nothing to see here, move along, was how I felt about it.
It’s been great, I don’t feel like I miss a thing. I can find out about everything worthwhile on the Internet, and often (as here) in a better format than anything on TV.
I have earbuds in my ears when I’m going from a to b, but I’m usually listening to audio books, not music. When I’m not listening to books, I’m usually listening to podcasts, except at the dentist. I have a playlist of music for the dentist, generally relaxing music.
I prefer to listen to music when I’m at home, so I can use better quality headphones.
I’ve pretty much given up on TV news, it’s too aggravating to watch, so I don’t. The last straw was watching CNN anchors literally make stuff up while they stood in the street while waiting for information on a spree shooter. They asked absurd and ridiculous questions of each other, and said things like “Oh, there’s a police car coming down the street now, oh, wait, no, it’s just a normal car.
Between that idiocy and their propensity to put either two know nothings on the air and let them argue, always ending the segment with “Well, I guess we aren’t going to get to the bottom of this today” (as if they ever get to the bottom of anything by putting fourth rate pundits on the air).
Or they put on one person who knows what they are talking about, and one lunatic who is given the same respect and credence as the scientific researcher who’s been working in her field for 35 years and has actual evidence for her conclusions, where as the other person is just denying everything the other says. They call this journalistic objectivity. It’s a bit of a joke.
I don’t disagree with the criticisms about social media and reporting, or the ubiquitous nature of social media. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter (but my grown-up kids do) and unless it’s a really long journey on a train I don’t even read.
But. Most humans are highly social animals – I think we don’t realise how much we are affected by our social environment. How people behave, whatever the implications, is how ‘we’ are. I can’t see any way of rolling back social media short of tyrannical laws.
Perhaps we should have prevented the ordinary people learning to read? Life has never been the same after printing was invented.
These kids and their mass-produced printed material. What a bunch of entitled, immediate-gratification-seeking brats. In my day, we spent weeks copying things out by hand on vellum. And we liked it! Built character.
!
I really don’t see how using an iPhone/iPad/whatever on a train is any less social than reading a book. Chances are it is more social since there is some chance you’re involved in a conversation with someone.
Vellum! You were lucky. We had to make do with a hammer and chisel, and a piece of rock.
We only dreamed of having rocks. We had sand, nothing but sand all around. We scratched our messages in it with our fingers and were happy for the chance.
I gave up on TV right around the time the major news outlets were updating all their graphics… all the more making the TV look like it was a computer being manipulated by the watcher. That was 1997, as I remember.
Have you tried tuning the radio to BBC World Service on long wave? At 05:00 Chicago, you’ll probably be getting the midnight news.
“Or maybe I just need another espresso. . .” Perhaps with a couple of shots of grappa added.
Don’t blame social media, blame the useless lazy cheapskate ‘news’ organisations.
At least clips stolen off Farcebook or Youboob or Twatter aren’t nearly as godawful as the cringe-inducing, slimy, meretricious, sensationalised, ambulance-chasing, banal, intrusive, mindless, moronic mountain of steaming doodoo that is so-called ‘reality’ TV.
(I may have missed a couple of adjectives there. Readers please supply from your own stock of invective).
cr
“Next time you’re on the train, notice what proportion of people are looking at their phones or listening to electronic music through headphones.”
Much though I may be unreasonably annoyed by the persistent, insistent quiet ’tish-tish, a-tish-tish’ of someone near me listening to r*p or h*p-h*p through leaky headphones and interfering with the sound of the diesel loco up ahead (which is what I like to listen to), I contrast that with the days before headphones/’earbuds’ became trendy and yoofs used to entertain the entire carriage with their transistor radios or ghettoblasters and their choice of ‘music’. So it’s way better now.
And also, if they’re absorbed in their electronic devices, they’re not going to try to talk to me while I’m quietly enjoying my train journey. Almost certainly about some topic I have no interest in, like (this being NZ) rugby. So I don’t have to be polite and talk back.
cr