Powerful and Concurrent Trends Have Converged to Turn Earbuds into Hearing Aids
What?
I remember when hearing aids were a stigma. When I was in grade school they were big, bulky things that some of the kids had to wear on their chests. I felt sorry for them. The bullies were relentlessly teasing them. The girls learned sign language with them.
I was and still am hearing impaired. I had a hearing aid that fits in a pair of glasses. They wore their vulnerability out there for everyone to see. I still got teased, but not everyone noticed my hearing aid.
I have watched hearing aids evolve since the 1970s. I’ve worn a hearing aid for 40 years now. I’ve never really talked about them with the people in my life. I’ve seen how they didn’t relate to hearing aids. Hearing impairment wasn’t a part of their lives when they were young. We didn’t have iPods then.
Around the 1990s, I saw the explosion of personal listening devices. Sony Walkman cassette players were all the rage then. The Walkman was displaced by the Apple iPod. People could take their music anywhere. The headphones moved from over the ear to inside the ear.
I can recall seeing people walking, and riding bikes with their iPods on. That just looked too scary for me. It was too dangerous for me to have music playing in my ears and…
