>>Nobody would notice it today as all hands wear iPods anyway! :-)
>
>OMG, that is soooo true! When we were in Paris, I was totally amazed at the vast number of people walking or bicycling by with the damn iPod ear-buds dangling from their ears!! And not all were young people either. Maybe I haven't done much people watching here lately, or maybe the iPods are more prevalent over there, I dunno ... but it just amazed me.
>
>~~Bonnie

I think of the old days, with people chatting on a bus, or reading, or just looking out the window.

Nowadays they're chatting on a mobile (so everyone on the bus can hear), listening to an iPod, or listening (audibly) to music from a mobile. It's like everyone's in his own little world. (Why is it people think they have to speak into the phone louder than the ambient sound,. when the other party is not encumbered by the same?)

Yet the old message about not listening to [transistor] radios so as to disturb other passengers is no longer there.

So what? Now that there are so many different ways to disturb other passengers we've just given up on it?