The Accident Compensation Corporation is flying the flag trying to warn the MP3 generation about the real possibility of them becoming the ”pardon, what did you say?” generation in 20 or so years.
It surprises me that the companies making these products are doing so little to help ensure the portable music players are used responsibly.
Surely it wouldn’t be that hard to include a decibel level meter on the players so the users - their customers - can see how loud they are playing the music from an audiologist’s point of view. Or what about software to make the music players cut-out if the noise levels were at to high a level over a set period of time.
Expert opinion states that pumping music at 100 decibels into your ears for more than 15 minutes will cause damage to your hearing. Now, doesn’t that make a decibel meter on your music player seem quite a bit more than a novelty add-on?
And, no, I don’t think having a warning in a throw-away booklet with a pointer to more detailed information on a website is showing corporate responsibility to users.
In an earlier blog on this topic I raised the possibility of class action lawsuits landing on these companies’ doorsteps in 25 years’ time. In hindsight, I’m now taking it as given the corporate lawyers of the US manufacturers have considered this possibility.
I’m picking their likely legal reasoning would be that such lawsuits will be unsuccessful on the basis it is common knowledge that long-term exposure to loud noise will damage your hearing. That’s one explanation as to why there has been no attempt to create some controls on volume levels along the lines of the above suggestions.
Another could be that marketing staff are insisting possible risks of long-term hearing impairment be underplayed, to avoid the perception an MP3 player is unsafe. After all it’s the next few years’ profit-performance bonuses that count in their eyes, not the youth of today having good hearing in their 40s.
The manufacturers certainly seem to believe that a few perfunctory paragraphs in the users manual spelling out the obvious will absolve them from all blame further down the road.
Well corporate lawyers and companies making music players, I would say think again. Attitudes change as do points of legal principle, (eg the rights of indigenous people over say the last 50 years), and when governments/health insurance firms start having to pay out bucket loads of money to keep hearing-impaired people hearing, they are going to be asking who or what caused the spike in hearing impairment. And this is when the ‘failure’ of the MP3 manufacturers (for whatever reasons) to install devices/software on the players to help protect users will come back and bite them big-time.
In 20 or so years I’m picking current MP3 users while discovering the delights of digital hearing aids - and the US juries in and around the year 2027 deciding the class action lawsuits - will have quite a jaundiced view of those companies and their ‘failure’ (a decibel meter on MP3 players right now, how hard would that be?) to sell a product without installing reasonable safeguards for users.
As well, Governments of the day and the health insurance firms will be looking to pin the blame (read: recoup their medical costs) on the companies, whose products were a major factor (”crucial” is what the juries will be saying) in creating the hearing impairment 'epidemic'.
