You can tell it was is a quiet news week if the BBC's online magazine is recycling old old stories with a bit of a modern twist. (This has all changed though, what with Charles Kennedy admitting to having alcohol problems and Arial Sharon suffering a bad stroke however I'm not going to a little fact like hard news ruin my rant it's sure not stopping BBCi news from being inconsequential.)
Which gets me onto my current bugbear. I've noticed that sometimes the quality of writing for the BBC news website is not up to scratch. An attention grabbing headline then a short and confusedly written piece beneath it which often seems to have little in common with the headline.
So please welcome the ipods will make you deaf scare story which is a re-invention of the walkmen will make you deaf story of 1979 which I remember as fondly as I do the winter of discontent.
Based on the very sensible advice from the RNID - "Don't listen to too loud music on your headphones" A headlines were frothed up implying that we were putting our hearing at risk if we used headphones. But the article itself did not seem to support the headline what so ever, Ok Pete Townshend is blaming headphones for his hearing lose but he's spent the last 40 years playing in one of the loudest ever rock bands there are other possible causes. The article also stated that good number of professional musicians have some form of hearing loss but not whether there is any link to head phones it becomes a fact thrown in to scare us.
The article says that all those dire warnings about the Walkman from the 80s do not seem to have come true and then quoted an audiologist as saying the biggest threat to hearing is not from your headphones it's from loud discos and pubs. But it did so in such a manner to hide the meaning.
I know that I don't produce glittering examples of what good writing should be but then I'm doing this for fun, it's not a job I got on the basis of journalistic skills and I'm not being paid to do so. That said, I try to ensure that what I write is clear and coherent even if the grammar and spelling are suspect.
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The Ipod differs from the old Walkman in more than one way.
ReplyDelete1. The old Walkman used cassette tapes, the IPod uses MP3 files. You can pack several hours on an IPod, which you could not do on the cassette Walkman. So, you can listen for much longer.
2. The IPod uses high capacity batteries, the old Walkman used AA cells that would run dry quicker due to the cassette mechanism
3. The IPod earbuds fit into the ear canal, the old headphones were more like ear muffs. The result is that the IPod ear buds (or any ear bud style headphones) are louder than older headphone styles.
But the solution is pretty easy. Keep the volume down, and take music breaks. No need to freak out or anything, just be aware of what can happen.