YOUR PHONE IS PERSONAL. ITS SPEAKER ISN’T.
I watched a couple sitting in an airport recently.
They were travelling together.
Other people they knew were sitting around them.
Yet both had their phones out.
Two different streams of short videos.
Two completely different soundtracks.
Both playing through the speakers.
One reel ended.
Another started.
Music.
Someone shouting.
A comedy clip.
A voiceover.
Another song.
Another person talking.
Neither seemed remotely conscious that everybody within several metres could hear both phones simultaneously.
More interestingly, they barely seemed conscious of each other.
Two people physically sitting side by side, each inside a separate pocket-sized entertainment environment, while the people around them attempted to have an actual conversation through the noise.
I see versions of this everywhere now.
On trains.
In airports.
In cafés.
In waiting rooms.
In living rooms.
Someone begins scrolling through videos with the sound turned up.
Another person makes a video call on speaker.
Someone watches football clips at full volume on a train.
Another scrolls through twenty-second videos containing twenty different fragments of music, speech and sound effects.
Sometimes they periodically try to recruit everyone around them.
“Watch this.”
“Look at this.”
“You’ve got to see this.”
Usually, nobody really does.
They humour them.
Watch the clip.
Give the required half-laugh.
Then attempt to return to whatever they were doing before somebody else's algorithm entered the room.
I find the behaviour fascinating because I cannot imagine doing it.
If I am somewhere other people can hear my phone, the sound stays off.
If I want sound, I use headphones.
Not because I consider myself unusually polite.
Because the alternative feels socially bizarre.
My entertainment is mine.
Why should everyone else have to listen to it?
Apparently that assumption is nowhere near as universal as I thought.
There Is Actually a Name for It
Ofcom calls the behaviour loudcasting.
And the numbers are extraordinary.
In its UK research, 46 per cent of people said they had watched videos without headphones in a public place.
Forty-five per cent said they had made video calls without headphones.
Thirty-six per cent said they had played music publicly from their device.
Yet eight in ten people said they found loudcasting annoying.
Even more remarkably, almost three quarters of people who admitted loudcasting themselves said they were annoyed when other people did it.
That contradiction may explain more about the behaviour than anything else.
People are not divided neatly into two groups.
Considerate people who hate public phone noise.
And selfish people who think everyone wants to hear theirs.
A large number of people apparently occupy both groups simultaneously.
My phone playing aloud feels reasonable.
Your phone playing aloud is irritating.
That is much more psychologically interesting than simple rudeness.
The Problem Is That Sound Is Not Personal
Smartphones create a strange illusion of privacy.
The device is personal.
The account is personal.
The feed is personal.
The recommendations are personal.
The messages are personal.
The screen is physically tiny and usually held centimetres from one person's face.
Everything about the experience says:
This is mine.
Then the speaker turns on.
At that moment, the experience stops being personal.
Sound does not respect the edge of the screen.
It crosses the room.
Enters other conversations.
Competes with television.
Interrupts reading.
Invades somebody else's train journey.
The user remains inside a personal experience.
Everyone else has suddenly been included in it.
That difference seems obvious when you describe it.
In practice, people appear increasingly bad at noticing it.
The phone has created a private psychological space without creating a private physical one.
We Are Very Good at Experiencing Our Own Experience
There is a broader psychological problem here.
Human beings start with their own perspective.
That is the only one we experience directly.
Researchers studying perspective-taking describe a process known as egocentric anchoring.
When trying to work out what another person sees, knows or feels, we tend to begin with our own position and then adjust from it.
The adjustment is often incomplete.
Related research into the false consensus effect has repeatedly found that people tend to assume their own preferences, choices and behaviours are more widely shared than they really are.
That does not mean somebody playing a reel aloud is consciously thinking:
Everyone in this carriage will find this hilarious.
The process is probably far less deliberate.
They find it entertaining.
It has their attention.
The sound belongs naturally to the experience they are having.
Their brain has context for it.
They know why they are watching.
They chose the creator.
They understand the joke.
They recognise the people involved.
To them, the noise has meaning.
To everybody else, it is just noise.
That distinction is easy to underestimate when your own experience is the one occupying your attention.
Your Funny Video Is Not Funny From Over Here
This becomes particularly obvious when people call others over repeatedly to watch clips.
The person holding the phone has already received the reward.
They saw something funny.
Interesting.
Outrageous.
Surprising.
Cute.
They want to share it.
Sharing genuinely can be social.
We have always shown one another things.
A newspaper article.
A photograph.
A joke.
A television programme.
A song.
The difference is volume and frequency.
A person who occasionally says, “You need to see this,” is sharing an experience.
Someone interrupting the room every three minutes because their feed has generated another mildly amusing video is effectively outsourcing part of their scrolling session to everyone nearby.
The algorithm has learned what interests them.
It has not learned what interests the room.
Yet the user becomes its distribution system.
They receive the recommendation.
Then recommend the recommendation to everyone else.
Often with the mistaken assumption that because the content earned their attention, it deserves yours too.
Pocket Entertainment Has Changed the Social Contract
For most of human history, entertainment in shared spaces was visibly shared.
If a family watched television, they watched one programme.
If music played in a pub, everyone heard the same music.
If a cinema showed a film, everyone had agreed to see it.
Even the irritating person with a massive portable stereo in the 1980s was obviously broadcasting something publicly.
Nobody mistook the boom box for a private activity.
Smartphones are different.
They allow every person in the same physical space to inhabit a different media environment.
Four people can sit around one table while separately watching four different things.
That is already socially strange.
Turn all four speakers on and the shared physical environment becomes almost incoherent.
We have created personalised entertainment without establishing equally strong social rules about when personal entertainment is allowed to become public sound.
The technology moved faster than the etiquette.
The Norm Is Clearly Changing
This is not merely something a few irritated people have imagined.
Transport for London created a Headphones On campaign specifically because passengers were complaining about people playing music and other content aloud.
The campaign launched in 2025 and was subsequently expanded across Tube and bus networks.
TfL research found that 70 per cent of surveyed customers regarded loud music and phone calls without headphones as a nuisance.
TfL's rules already prohibit playing streamed content or music aloud on the network without permission, with enforcement available if passengers refuse requests to stop.
The interesting thing is not that authorities have had to remind people.
It is that we reached the point where the reminder became necessary.
“Please don't force an entire train carriage to listen to your TikTok feed” feels like something society should have been capable of establishing without signage.
Apparently not.
Bad Manners Can Become Normal Through Repetition
Social norms are partly learned by observing what other people do.
If nobody plays videos aloud on a train, the first person considering it encounters a strong signal:
People don't do that here.
If three people are already doing it, the signal changes.
The behaviour begins to look permissible.
Perhaps slightly annoying.
But normal.
Research into phubbing, the act of ignoring people who are physically present in favour of a phone, points towards precisely this kind of normative process.
A recent systematic review found that environmental and social norms matter: observing other people phubbing can increase its perceived acceptability and contribute to its continuation.
That creates a feedback loop.
People use phones intrusively because the behaviour feels normal.
Other people observe it.
The behaviour looks more normal.
More people do it.
The social cost of being the person who breaks the norm decreases because the norm itself has weakened.
Eventually, asking somebody to stop can feel more socially confrontational than playing the video aloud did in the first place.
That is quite an achievement.
Most People Would Rather Move Than Say Anything
Ofcom found that around half of people simply do nothing when somebody loudcasts.
Among those who react, the most common response is to move away.
Only around nine per cent ask the person to stop.
That matters.
Social norms require reinforcement.
If someone behaves intrusively and nobody responds, they receive no information indicating that their behaviour crossed a boundary.
Everyone silently thinks:
What an inconsiderate twat.
The person continues scrolling happily.
From their perspective, absolutely nothing happened.
Nobody complained.
Nobody objected.
Nobody left in an obvious enough way to connect the movement with their behaviour.
So their internal evidence says:
Apparently this is fine.
The considerate people bear the cost precisely because they are more reluctant to impose themselves.
There is a strange asymmetry in that.
The person willing to impose their audio upon thirty strangers is often protected by the fact that the thirty strangers are too considerate to create a confrontation.
Then There Is the Phone Bubble
I think something else is happening too.
Smartphones narrow the field of awareness.
Not necessarily because people are addicted.
Not because they become incapable of perceiving the world.
Because attention follows relevance.
The person scrolling has:
- a visual task;
- moving images;
- changing speech;
- novelty;
- personal recommendations;
- social information;
- humour;
- music;
- emotional content.
Their attention is occupied.
The surrounding environment becomes background.
That can include the people sitting beside them.
This is where the behaviour becomes more than an acoustic problem.
It becomes a social one.
Researchers call ignoring a physically present person in favour of a phone phubbing.
Experimental work has found that being phubbed reduces perceived communication quality, belonging and relationship satisfaction.
A 2025 meta-analysis combining 52 studies and almost 20,000 participants found partner phubbing was associated with lower relationship satisfaction, intimacy and responsiveness and with greater conflict.
That does not mean every glance at a phone damages a relationship.
Sometimes shared phone use is genuinely social.
Showing your partner a photograph or researching something together can enhance an interaction.
Research has found that the negative effects are reduced when the device use is genuinely shared rather than excluding the other person.
But two people sitting together while independently consuming different feeds is something else.
They are physically co-present.
Psychologically elsewhere.
Add both speakers and everyone around them is forced into the gap.
The Sound Is Harder to Ignore Than the User Realises
There is another reason loudcasting feels disproportionately intrusive.
Speech is extremely good at capturing human attention.
The brain is not a passive microphone capable of simply turning unwanted language off.
Decades of research into the irrelevant speech effect show that background speech can interfere with certain forms of working memory and cognitive performance even when people are explicitly told to ignore it.
The effect depends upon the task and properties of the sound.
It is not true that every voice in the background destroys concentration.
But understandable, changing speech is particularly difficult when another person is attempting verbal or memory-heavy work.
A 2020 review of fourteen studies found that intelligible irrelevant speech reliably affected verbal short-term memory and showed effects on some other cognitively demanding tasks.
More recent experimental research has also found irrelevant speech can increase annoyance and perceived workload while impairing performance on some memory tasks.
This explains why someone watching reels can be much more irritating than a steady mechanical noise at the same volume.
The sound changes constantly.
One voice.
Another voice.
Music.
Laughter.
A shout.
A sentence your brain begins decoding before you have consciously decided you do not care.
Then another clip starts.
Your attention keeps being presented with new material to reject.
The person holding the phone has chosen every one of those inputs.
Everyone else has to keep refusing them.
That Is the Part Loudcasters Do Not Pay For
The loudcaster gets the entertainment.
Everyone else pays the attentional cost.
That is the part of this behaviour I find most interesting.
The cost is externalised.
If I decide to watch thirty reels with headphones, I absorb the consequence.
My attention is fragmented.
My time is spent.
My feed is mine.
If I watch them aloud on a train, I have made a unilateral decision about part of everyone else's sensory environment.
They did not opt in.
They cannot turn my volume down.
They cannot skip my video.
They did not select my content.
Yet their brains must process enough of it to realise they do not want it.
Pocket entertainment stops being pocket entertainment at precisely that point.
Why Don't People Notice?
There probably is not one answer.
Some genuinely may not realise how intrusive their phone sounds from several metres away.
Some have grown up in environments where loudcasting has become normal.
Some see other people doing it and infer that the boundary no longer exists.
Some are sufficiently absorbed in the content that awareness of the surrounding environment has narrowed.
Some may assume other people will not mind because they themselves do it.
Some perhaps know perfectly well and prioritise their own convenience anyway.
We should be careful about diagnosing strangers from one behaviour.
The Ofcom finding suggests outright selfishness cannot explain all of it.
Remember:
A substantial proportion of loudcasters themselves dislike hearing other people loudcast.
That looks less like:
I don't give a shit about anybody else.
And more like:
I experience my own behaviour completely differently from how I experience yours.
That is a classic human problem.
Technology has simply given it speakers.
The Phone Has Redefined What Counts as Silence
There was a time when sitting quietly in a public place meant largely accepting the environment that already existed.
Conversation.
Announcements.
Traffic.
Children.
Coffee machines.
Aircraft.
Trains.
Human noise.
Now everyone carries an object capable of adding an entirely new media stream to that environment instantly.
The distinction matters.
A person talking to the friend beside them belongs naturally to the shared environment.
A child laughing belongs there.
An airport announcement has a purpose.
Somebody's algorithmically selected sequence of thirty unrelated videos does not belong to the environment merely because their phone happens to be physically inside it.
There is a difference between the unavoidable sound of people sharing a space and importing private media into that space.
We seem to be losing that distinction.
Public Space Requires Tiny Acts of Restraint
Civilised shared space is built from thousands of behaviours nobody legislates explicitly.
You do not stand centimetres behind a stranger in an empty queue.
You do not read the message on somebody else's phone.
You do not shout every conversation.
You do not let a door slam into the person behind you.
You generally avoid placing your belongings across every available seat.
These are tiny acts of situational awareness.
Nobody applauds them.
You simply recognise that other people exist.
Headphones belong in the same category.
They are not primarily technology.
They are social infrastructure.
They allow you to create a private auditory environment without annexing the auditory environment everyone else is using.
That is a remarkably elegant solution.
Your content.
Your volume.
Your choice.
Nobody else needs to participate.
Perhaps the Real Problem Is Awareness
I keep returning to one question.
How can somebody sit among other human beings and apparently not register the effect they are having upon them?
Because this behaviour sits inside a much bigger shift.
We increasingly inhabit personalised digital worlds while remaining physically surrounded by people inhabiting completely different ones.
The phone knows what you want.
The feed adapts to you.
The playlist belongs to you.
The recommendations are selected for you.
The advertising profiles you.
The device becomes extraordinarily good at placing the individual at the centre of their informational environment.
Then the person puts the speaker on.
And for a moment, their personalised world becomes everybody's world.
Perhaps repeated personalisation subtly encourages us to forget the transition.
Not because algorithms deliberately make people selfish.
Because the digital environment is organised around the user.
Shared physical space is not.
The physical world constantly asks for adjustment.
Move slightly.
Lower your voice.
Wait your turn.
Notice the person beside you.
Realise someone else is concentrating.
Accept that the thing you find hilarious may be completely uninteresting to everybody else.
Personalised technology removes much of that negotiation.
Everything arrives for you.
Public life still requires remembering that everything is not about you.
This Is Why the Behaviour Irritates Me So Much
It is not really the noise.
Noise exists everywhere.
It is what the noise represents.
A momentary failure to recognise the existence of everybody else.
Not maliciousness necessarily.
Not narcissism.
Not stupidity.
A collapse in situational awareness.
The person is sufficiently present to their screen that they are insufficiently present to the room.
They may still be sitting with family.
Friends.
A partner.
Other passengers.
Other people trying to read, talk, work, watch something or simply sit quietly.
But pocket entertainment has become so easy and so individually relevant that the shared environment loses priority.
The paradox is extraordinary.
We have built the most personalised entertainment systems in human history.
Then decided everyone else should hear them.
There Is a Very Simple Test
Before playing something aloud, imagine everybody else in the room doing the same thing.
Every passenger on the train.
Every table in the café.
Every person in the airport departure lounge.
Every member of the family.
Twenty phones.
Twenty feeds.
Twenty completely different streams of speech, music, shouting, laughter and advertising.
Would the environment still function?
If the answer is no, the behaviour works only because most other people have chosen not to do it.
Your freedom to loudcast depends upon everybody else's restraint.
That should tell us something.
Final Thought
Phones gave us an extraordinary ability to carry entertainment anywhere.
That did not give us the right to make the entertainment belong to everyone around us.
The screen is personal.
The feed is personal.
The recommendations are personal.
The speaker is not.
Once the sound leaves the device, it enters shared space.
At that point, the question is no longer:
Do I want to hear this?
It is:
Have I bothered to notice whether anybody else does?
Most of the people around you will never ask you to turn it down.
They will move.
Stop talking.
Lose their place.
Turn their own television up.
Put headphones on to protect themselves from the phone you chose not to put headphones on for.
Or simply sit there becoming increasingly irritated while you remain blissfully unaware.
Silence should not require everybody else to defend themselves against your entertainment.
Pocket entertainment solved the problem of being bored wherever we went.
Perhaps the next social skill we need to relearn is remembering that wherever we went...
other people were already there.
Sources & Research Gaps
Principal Sources
Ofcom: Loudcasting and Headphone-Free Listening
Ofcom's UK research found that 46 per cent of respondents said they watched videos without headphones in public places, 45 per cent made video calls without headphones and 36 per cent listened to music aloud.
Eight in ten respondents said loudcasting annoyed them.
Crucially, almost three quarters of people who themselves loudcast also reported being annoyed when other people did it.
Only around nine per cent said they would ask someone to stop; moving away was considerably more common.
Transport for London: Headphones On
TfL introduced its Headphones On messaging after customer complaints about loud music and phone content on public transport.
Research cited by the Mayor of London in 2026 found that 70 per cent of 1,000 surveyed TfL customers considered loud music and calls without headphones a nuisance.
TfL's byelaws also prohibit playing streamed content or music aloud without permission, although engagement and voluntary compliance are normally preferred to enforcement.
Egocentric Anchoring and Perspective-Taking
Epley and colleagues proposed that people estimate other people's perspectives partly by beginning from their own and adjusting away from it.
Their experiments found evidence of persistent egocentric influence and incomplete adjustment.
False Consensus Effect
Research spanning many experiments has found that people tend to perceive their own behaviours and preferences as more common than people choosing alternatives perceive them to be.
This is used here as a possible psychological mechanism helping explain why somebody may experience their own loudcasting differently from somebody else's.
It does not establish the cause of loudcasting specifically.
Phubbing Research
Experimental work has found that phone use which excludes a physically present person can reduce perceived communication quality, belonging and relationship satisfaction.
A 2025 meta-analysis combining 52 studies and 19,698 participants found partner phubbing was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction, intimacy and responsiveness and positively associated with conflict.
The analysis also identified problematic media use and several psychological factors among correlates of phubbing.
Research also suggests the social effect differs when phone use is genuinely shared. Involving another person in the activity can reduce feelings of exclusion compared with unilateral phone use.
Irrelevant Speech and Auditory Distraction
Research on the irrelevant speech effect demonstrates that unattended speech can disrupt some memory and cognitively demanding tasks despite attempts to ignore it.
A systematic review examining speech intelligibility found particularly consistent effects upon verbal short-term memory, with some effects upon working-memory and complex verbal tasks.
A later experimental study found that irrelevant speech increased annoyance and perceived workload and reduced accuracy on a serial-recall task compared with a quieter condition.
Research Gaps and Limitations
There is surprisingly little peer-reviewed research examining loudcasting itself as a distinct behaviour.
Ofcom provides useful UK prevalence and attitude data, but it does not establish why individuals loudcast.
The explanations proposed in this essay, including reduced situational awareness, egocentric perspective-taking, normalisation and absorption in personalised content, should therefore be treated as plausible mechanisms rather than proven causes.
False consensus and egocentric anchoring are general psychological effects.
Neither demonstrates that a specific person playing videos aloud assumes other people share their preferences.
People may loudcast for many reasons, including habit, convenience, accessibility needs, lack of headphones, different cultural expectations or deliberate disregard for surrounding people.
It would be inappropriate to infer personality traits such as narcissism, low intelligence or lack of empathy from the behaviour alone.
The Ofcom survey relies upon self-reported behaviour.
Actual loudcasting rates may differ.
The phubbing literature concerns attention directed towards a device during co-present social interaction.
Loudcasting and phubbing overlap but are not the same behaviour.
A person may loudcast without ignoring a companion, and someone may phub another person while their device remains completely silent.
Much of the relationship research is correlational.
Poor relationship quality may encourage greater phone use as well as phone use affecting relationship quality.
Research into irrelevant speech is usually conducted during controlled cognitive tasks.
It does not prove that every instance of hearing somebody's phone causes measurable cognitive impairment.
The disruptive effect varies according to the listener, task, volume, speech intelligibility and characteristics of the sound.
Further research would be valuable into:
- why people who dislike loudcasting nevertheless engage in it themselves;
- whether loudcasting has increased over time;
- how public norms around speaker use differ by age and culture;
- whether frequent exposure normalises the behaviour;
- how short-form video audio differs from continuous speech or music in perceived annoyance;
- whether personalised content produces reduced awareness of shared physical environments;
- how people judge the acceptability of their own phone noise compared with identical noise produced by a stranger;
- whether headphones campaigns change behaviour sustainably;
- how accessibility needs can be protected without normalising unnecessary public audio;
- whether repeated public phone audio materially affects conversation quality, stress or cognitive performance outside laboratory environments.
The evidence supports the conclusion that loudcasting is widely disliked and that unwanted speech can impose attentional and social costs.
It does not support diagnosing everybody who does it as selfish, unaware or deliberately antisocial.