One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
It won’t hush the din, but there’s nothing like mutual loathing to foster a sense of community. No one moves to New York City for peace and quiet. But over the past couple of years, every other person seems to have ditched their headphones and is brandishing their phones like radios set to a nightmare station. In cafes, buses and planes, iPhones assault the air with music, TikTok videos and, most annoyingly, speakerphone calls. Some media outlets call this “loudcasting. I call it an atrocity. There should be a law that speakerphone only activates when the person is sharing lethal gossip. Of course, this isn’t just a New York problem. He called blaring smartphones a descendant of 1980s boomboxes. But even in hip-hop’s heyday, not everyone had a boombox. And boomboxes don’t drone on about what they’re cooking for dinner. I called Erica Walker, an epidemiologist who runs Brown University’s Community Noise Lab, to rant at a polite volume about the speakerphone epidemic. Walker, whose lab studies how neighborhood sounds affect our health, suggested that the nature of the noise likely irks me as much as the volume. Some places are rightly punishing the noisy. Turns out, New York has its own rules against blaring your phone on the subway. To be fair, I don’t know how a quiet-phone rule is supposed to be enforced, short of officers patrolling trains all day. And if you’re a commuter, good luck telling someone their TikTok addiction is “breaching official MTA policy. The safest way to escape the cacophony is to reach for noise-canceling headphones. But that turns each of us into even sadder little islands—why we’re in this mess to begin with! The more social approach, and my personal preference, is to huff and glare at the human foghorn—and try to catch the eye of a fellow pissed-off commuter. Write to Jamie Waters at [email protected]
In a 2025 survey of more than 1,500 Americans by the phone-number provider NumberBarn, 37% of respondents admitted to using speakerphone in public, with nearly half of Gen Zers doing this, making them the chief offenders. Wetherspoons, the British megachain pub, which has around 800 branches, recently announced a ban on patrons using speakerphone or playing music out loud from their phones. I asked the DCPI, the NYPD’s media arm, how many fines were given out in 2025 for noisy phones on public transport. Who directed me to a specific code, there were 96 summonses issued for the year, according to a spokesperson. In a city of more than 8 million people.
One in five people, meanwhile, said they watch videos or play music on their phones without headphones. Turkle said she recently asked a woman who was blasting “Sex and the City” from her smartphone at a Cape Cod cafe if she could “listen privately,” and was told that was impossible—she’d forgotten her AirPods. Turkle views this as part of a “deteriorating” sense of responsibility to our neighbors. Our phones, she said, are locking us into “asocial digital bubbles. Nilam Ram, a psychology and communication professor at Stanford University studying smartphone use in everyday life, described this as the latest evolution of “sonic ebullience” in public spaces, a lovely-sounding term for a terrible-sounding problem. She said it’s more irritating, for instance, to overhear social-media videos than to witness a face-to-face conversation at the same volume, because “personal listening devices are supposed to be personal. ” Walker blamed the erosion of our phone manners partly on social media, which creates the sense that we must be “on” at all times, surroundings be damned. Earlier this year, United Airlines said it reserves the right to kick the headphone-avoidant off a flight or permanently ban them from the airline. Last year, a New Yorker was stabbed on the subway after asking a man to lower the volume of his phone conversation, the Queens district attorney’s office said.
In the survey’s overall phone etiquette rankings—which took into account speakerphone use, watching videos without headphones and other crimes such as talking on the phone while waiting in line—New York was the second most badly behaved city. Miami, which I will never be visiting again, was the worst.
Today’s technology “makes it easy to misbehave,” noted Sherry Turkle, who studies our relationships with phones as professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT.
