Forgetting [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

In the same day, I both forgot that I was wearing my hearing aids before jumping under the shower, and that I should maybe carry spare batteries before going to a family gathering.

P13 Hearing Aid Batteries

As I live alone, I usually put on my hearing aids before leaving home as opposed to first thing when I jump out of bed. As I have a friend visiting these days, my hearing aid routine has changed — I’m not a morning person to start with, so add “no ears” on top of that and you get a very poor morning communicator.

So, Saturday I actually climbed into the shower, turned it on, and was about to raise it above my head to wash my hair when it suddenly dawned on me to make sure I didn’t have my hearing aids in. A niggling doubt. A close shave, too, because there they were, sitting on my ears.

Later that day, after a rather frantic morning running around, we headed out to a cabin in the woods (a “refuge” as we call them here in Switzerland) for a big family party to celebrate my aunt’s 70th birthday. An hour in, I hear the ominous beeping coming into my right ear.

“Oh no! I hope it lasts long enough for me to enjoy the rest of the party!”

My Widex aids give me two warnings and then go dead. If my memory serves me right, I have an hour or so after the first warning at the most.

With Phonak, they seem to chime every half-hour or so (again, I didn’t time it, writing this from memory). And the first time I reached the end of a pair of batteries, I had the feeling they lasted forever after the first warning. Hours, if not half a day. But the last time I reached the end of my batteries I was surprised to have one go dead pretty soon after the first beeps. Maybe I missed the previous ones in the noise?

All this to say that when my hearing aids started telling me “battery’s going”, I didn’t really know if it would be fine for the rest of the afternoon, or if they would be dead 20 minutes later. I had the niggling suspicion I hadn’t brought any replacement batteries with me.

My “Phonak batteries” are bigger and last longer than my “Widex batteries” (I know they’re not Phonak or Widex batteries, but that’s how I think of them). I got used to always carrying my smaller batteries around with my Widex aids because I couldn’t really go a week without changing them. With something like 10 days or more between each battery change with my Phonaks, it’s easy to get sloppy and stop carrying batteries. Specially when the hearing aid warns you (normally!) well in advance.

I got caught once already two weeks ago without spare batteries: on a trek in the mountains, which I finished hearing-aid-less (because honestly, if most of what I’m doing is walking and panting, one hearing aid is more annoying than none).

My niggling suspicion turned out to be correct, once again: I went through my bags, and indeed I hadn’t brought spare batteries. I had even taken my little “emergency pouch” out of my handbag to make space before leaving.

Then my first hearing aid went dead. I took it out, opened it, closed it and put it back in. Got a grand 5 minutes of extra hearing time with it. It wasn’t even 2pm and the party was going to last until early evening…

I ended up jumping in my car and heading back home to pick up some batteries, cursing my lack of foresight. Luckily I didn’t live very far from the “refuge” and the batteries were in the very “emergency pouch” I had discarded earlier, so it took me about 15 seconds to find them.

Thirty minutes later, I was back with my family, vowing to never go anywhere again without spare batteries! (Which, of course, I promptly did the next day, as I had just changed my batteries. Right?)

Impressions on New Hearing Aids [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

As promised, here are my impressions of the Bolero hearing aids I’m currently trying out (hoping I don’t get any of the technical stuff wrong here, do tell me if I did!). They have open tips, like my Widex ones have, but are BTE (entirely behind-the-ear) rather than RIC (with the receiver, the part that produces sounds, directly in the ear canal — this would be the Phonak Audéo model, which I might try in future). My Phonak audiologist Jennifer tells me it doesn’t change much, acoustically: a RIC just moves some of the technology away from behind the ear, allowing the part that sits there to be smaller — important for those, who, like Steve, appreciate when their hearing aids are invisible.

Phonak Bolero Q90

The first thing that struck me with these aids was that there was less ambiant noise. Or less operating noise. Or different. I had the strange feeling I wasn’t really wearing hearing aids. There was probably a little less amplification than what I was used to, but clearly something in the sound texture too.

Voices felt a little tinny/reverb-y at first. Mine, Jennifer’s. Not unpleasant, but a little bit weird. Jennifer told me it was probably due to SoundRecover, which compresses high frequencies into a lower frequency region so we can hear them better. She warned me it would take some time getting used to. I don’t notice anything strange with voices nowadays, so I guess I did indeed get used to it!

I discovered that with Phonak there is a whole list of programmes the hearing aids can switch back and forth from, and which can also be set manually. I left my “main” channel in automatic mode to see how that worked, and for the other ones picked StereoZoom, which is optimised for speech in noisy environments, with a lot of noise reduction and a very narrow beam for amplification, speech in wind (for sailing), and a phone programme (right ear). The last position is a “mute” mode (indispensable for me).

The buttons on both aids have different roles: they can either be used to turn volume up or down, or switch programmes. The catch is that the left button is the “volume down” one, and the right button “volume up”. So as I wanted a “volume up” button, I had to have my programme switch one on the left — whereas it would have made more sense for me to have it on the right. I’m right-handed, and switch programmes more often than I increase volume. Oh well.

I can’t say I’ve used the phone programme much. I tried it, and it works, taking the sound from the right ear (the phone one) and channeling it into the left ear too. It’s pretty neat. But it requires positioning the phone in such a way that the hearing aid catches the phone sound (takes some getting used to) and pressing the phone against my ear with the hearing aid in it ended up being a bit too uncomfortable. So, for long planned calls I’ve reverted to my trusty earbuds. For impromptu calls I still tend to switch to mute, because background noise sometimes interferes with the phone mode (i.e., gets amplified too) and I don’t really feel like experimenting with acoustics when I’m on a call. I guess I should probably run some test calls to really try that mode out.

Given the lousy weather this summer, “speech in wind” has also been largely left aside, as it’s the programme I was planning to use when sailing. I like StereoZoom, though I sometimes have trouble determining if I should use it or leave the hearing aid in automatic mode, specially as automatic mode has a whole bunch of different programmes it can switch to and even blend.

While it’s nice to have a hearing aid that recognises the acoustic environment and chooses the best programme suited to it, it’s sometimes frustrating in practice. I’ll be in my car talking to a friend, and suddenly the quality of the sound changes and I have more trouble understanding speech. And then it changes back. Or I’ll be listening to music in the car, and one ear seems to be treating sound differently from the other. I find the whole concept of a hearing aid intelligent enough to know what it’s listening to fascinating, and would love to know more about how to the tech/programme works, but the control-geek in me would like to be able to have some kind of indication telling me which mode I’m in, and an easy way to override it.

I haven’t yet put my Widex aids back in my ears, which in my opinion points to how comfortable I am with the Phonaks. There’ll be a little tweaking to do next time I go to headquarters and see Jennifer (one ear is slightly less-amplified, and maybe I need a smaller size tip in one ear, we’ll see), and I’ll probably change my selection of programmes, including at least the music one.

Trying Something Different [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

It’s no secret that I’m not a Phonak customer, despite being the editor-in-chief of this blog. It could be argued that this is a good or a bad thing, but right now I’m actually not convinced that it’s all that important.

Fitting some Phonak hearing aids

Anyway, since I started working with Phonak, it’s been (kindly) joked about that something needed to be done about my hearing aids. To tell the truth, I’m very happy about my current hearing aids, and not just because of their colour. I like the sound quality, I like the way my voice sounds (important! I speak a lot!), I even find their operating noise soothing. They allow me to understand people so much better and have really changed my life.

My complaints? Well, restaurants, mainly (who doesn’t complain about restaurants?) and the crackling sound they make when faced with loud noises. Oh, and the phone.

Last time I went to Phonak headquarters in Stäfa, we arranged an appointment with one of the audiologists there (Jennifer) so I could try out some Phonak hearing aids. This would allow me, well, to try out their technology and maybe talk about it (what I’m going to do in a bit), and also to play around with Phonak accessories. After all the horrible things I had to say about the M-DEX (and I’m not alone), my Phonak colleagues kept saying “oh, you should try the Roger Pen”. Well, my current hearing aids don’t let me do that. So, first step in that direction: for the last few weeks I’ve been walking around with Phonaks on my ears.

Overall, I like them. I’ll write another post about the acoustic/hearing stuff, but what I want to talk about now is differences. Differences in audiologists, fitting process, hearing aids. Is different good or bad? The answer is probably in the eye of the beholder.

First, I had a really interesting discussion with Jennifer about how to take an audiogramme. Jennifer is from the UK, and the process taught and used there is different from the French/Swiss one I’d experienced until now. She starts with a loud sound, so I know what I need to listen to. Then she makes it softer and softer. When I don’t hear it anymore she goes back up until I do again. Then back down until I don’t. In this way she pinpoints the exact spot where I lose the sound. I have to say this makes it less stressful than the “usual” (to me) beeping-sound-getting-louder process. Hearing tests and sound-proof booths are great environments for drowning in your tinnitus, and I always ended up realising that I’d been hearing the beeping sound for quite a bit before I actually realised I was hearing it (if that makes sense). “OMG that was a real sound!”

Now, does it make a huge difference in the resulting audiogramme… Not certain. But it was interesting to see that the way certain things are done is really a product of culture.

Steph all plugged in :-)Second, to program my hearing aids Jennifer plugged wires into the back of them. It felt strangely cyborgy, in a cool way. But in my opinion it’s a bit more cumbersome than a wireless solution. With Widex all I had to do is wear a kind of big necklace which connected wirelessly with both the computer and the hearing aids. (To be honest, I can’t remember if Phonak fitting is always wireful or if this was because we were in a test/trial/development environment.)

Third, the in-the-ear sound measurement sound is different: Widex uses some kind of breathy rythmic burts of noise (not very pleasant), whereas Phonak has a combination of background noise and human voices speaking a mash of languages. Pretty surreal to listen to, because bits and pieces feel familiar but the whole thing is of course unintelligible. A kind of audio “lorem ipsum“? As somebody with a strong interest in languages I found it quite fascinating.

At this stage, I feel a bit like somebody switching from Mac to PC or vice-versa. Change in ecosystem!

We all know that hearing aids require habituation. So I’ve left “my” hearing aids in a drawer these last weeks and stuck to the Phonaks. What I want to do (soon!) but am apprehending a bit is swap back. I’m used to the Phonaks now, and I have kind of forgotten what my Widex aids sound like. To compare, I need to go back to them.

Why the apprehension? Well, I feel a bit in a “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” situation. What if I prefer my old hearing aids? What if I prefer the test ones? But to be honest, I have the feeling it’ll be more nuanced. It’s not a clear-cut 10 to 1. But still, I’m apprehensive. I’ll probably do a first write-up before the swap, and another one afterwards. Interesting, no?

Mimi Is Making Me Dream [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

When I did my frustrating trial of the M-DEX two years ago, I kind of gave up on using my hearing aids with my phone. I have a mute programme for when I need to put the phone to my ear (I have open tips), but most of the time, I take my hearing aids out, put my earbuds in, and crank up the volume.

Here’s what I wished for at the time:

I can’t believe there isn’t a simple “equalizer” software or application for my phone which I could feed my audiogram to and which would then amplify the frequencies I need. Clearly it wouldn’t be as good as a proper hearing aid, but I’m sure it would help a bit. If you know more about why this isn’t done, I’m all ears (!).

A few weeks ago, Vincent sent me a link to the Mimi launch announcement. It’s worth taking a few minutes to watch the video below:

I was almost jumping up and down with excitement. If they pull this off, I think it could be pretty cool. Let’s unpack a bit.

Mimi announces it’ll do exactly what I was wishing for two years ago! A lot of my “sound input” in life comes from my phone (conversations, music, podcasts). I’m impatiently waiting for Mimi to be available through the Swiss iTunes store, but if you live in the US, you can already get an early version of Mimi. I’m not sure it does the “equalizing” bit yet though, but works already as an application to measure hearing loss. Those already exist (remember Anna’s post about them?), so that’s not really new, but Mimi will be able to do much more.

These last days I’ve been reading through some of the results of MarkeTrack, a global US survey around hearing loss and the hearing aid market. One of the things the survey tries to figure out is what the obstacles are to hearing aid use. It’s complex, as you can imagine (and that reading would have come in handy as I was thinking about why we underestimate hearing loss) but one of the elements that stayed with me is that getting an objective measure of your hearing loss is one step towards getting fitted. If you never get tested, you never get fitted.

This actually fits with my story: during those years where I was “coping” and thinking that maybe I’d give hearing aids another go at some point, one pivotal moment was when I walked past the “hearing bus” and decided to drop in for a test. I’d already had an audiogram made, quite a few times, but it had been a while and I was in this phase of thinking that my “hearing problem” wasn’t very serious. The bus guy changed that perception for me: at most frequencies, I couldn’t hear two out of the four sounds, and he told me that when only one was missing he referred people to an audiologist. This is the moment when I started taking my hearing loss more seriously.

So, couple a “hearing test” app with a feature that will already let you benefit from adapted amplification when you’re using the phone, or use your phone as an amplifier: that might give some people a preview of what it is like to hear more sounds — and for people like me, who don’t want to deal with cumbersome intermediaries between phone and ears, and “get by” removing their hearing aids to use the phone, well, it might just be the little magic app we have been waiting for.

There is certainly much more to say about Mimi: the cheap subscription model they are working on for a Bluetooth “hearing enhancer”, or the fact that these are players who are approaching the hearing tech market using the smartphone as a starting-point, and thus tackling some long-standing issues from scratch again. But that sounds like material for another post.

Tell Them, I Say [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

The other day I was chatting with my podologist (who is also a friend) and the topic of hearing aids and hearing loss came up.

She was surprised to learn i had hearing aids (we’re not close, so it’s understandable she didn’t know), and quickly started telling me about how many of her clients are elderly people who are hard of hearing. She said she often had to repeat things and had made it a habit of speaking loudly.
guidance
I asked her if she ever told them, explaining that as we can’t hear what we don’t hear, many people with hearing loss underestimate the degree to which it impairs their ability to communicate. Often, indeed, it is comments from people around us that drive us to investigate our hearing.

She was stunned to realise that they might not be aware of their condition. Based on the information I’ve gleaned here and there (and my own personal experience), I think it’s common for people who are in denial about their hearing loss to assume that it’s the person speaking who is mumbling or not talking loud enough. Or that we can hear fine when people speak, it’s just that we have trouble understanding.

Since I’ve been fitted, I have to say I’ve been on a bit of a mission to encourage people around me who suspect they might not hear well or who know they have hearing loss to take the first step of getting an audiogramme done. At the very least, you get some kind of objective measure of your situation.

I encouraged her to broach the subject with her clients, when it was obvious to her they weren’t hearing well. “Have you had your hearing checked lately?” Or “do you know you ask me to repeat things often”, or “I make a conscious effort to speak loudly with you, it might be worth getting an audiogramme done.” I also explained how it is better to be fitted early, as adjustment to hearing aids is less brutal with milder loss, and when you’re younger. Better not wait until you’re 95 and deaf as a doorknob to get your first hearing aid!

How I “Get” People to Talk to me so I Can Understand Them [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

A complaint I’ve heard a few times lately in the hearing loss support groups I hang out in is that “full-hearing” people resist making the effort to talk to us in such a way that we can understand them. Or they do sometimes, but then forget. I feel a lot of frustration around this for some people, sometimes translated into judgements about the other “not caring” or “not paying attention” or “being offended”.

Misunderstanding

This reminds me a little, in a “through the looking-glass” way, of how we “less-hearing” people are sometimes accused of “not paying attention”, “not making an effort”, or “being distracted”.

I try to always look at situations like this from the various points of view of the players involved. My work with people and technology, as well as teaching, have led me to adopt a kind of “user-experience-centric” attitude. Now, UX is definitely not my primary field of expertise (so forgive me in advance if it’s yours), but one thing I do quite consistently is try and put myself in other people’s shoes and see the logic in their way of thinking or doing things.

How does this apply here? What does it look like for people with full hearing who are trying to communicate with me?

People have communication habits. Volume of speech, but also, they know from experience when they can be heard or not, at what distance conversation becomes impossible. Most people being “well-hearing” (I kind of like that expression), their communication habits are adapted to people without hearing loss. Years ago, a friend of mine commented (when I said that I didn’t seem to have too much trouble understanding people) that everyone around me made efforts when speaking with me, but that I didn’t see it. They subconsciously spoke louder, learned to get my attention before saying something, etc. It was a bit of a shock for me. But it made sense. (This was before I got fitted.)

So, basically, when we have hearing loss, we’re requiring of people around us that they communicate differently with us, and break their deeply ingrained habits of speech for us. They need to learn and remember that they need to speak to us from distance x < “standard intelligible conversation distance”, for example. Or they need to remember not to speak to us when we’re not looking. Or when we’re in another room. Or too softly. All these things that “work” with almost everyone they know do not work as well with us. They’re used to talking to other neighbours from their balcony or across the street, but that’s too far for us.

I try to keep this in mind. I approach it like training. It’s my responsibility to teach them what works and doesn’t work with me, communication-wise. And sometimes spelling things out is really useful.

I usually take a moment at some point to tell “new people” that I don’t hear well, and that even with my hearing aids I might ask them to repeat stuff if they are looking away from me or in another room. If I’m without my hearing aids, I tell people.

I know they are going to forget even if they don’t intend to, and it’s never pleasant to be reminded that you forgot to do something that is necessary for somebody else. So even though it’s not my fault I have hearing loss and I don’t have to apologise for it, it’s not their fault either and I am asking them to do something out-of-their-ordinary to accommodate my particular circumstances. That’s why I often apologise when I ask people to repeat things (not systematically, but at least a few times in the beginning). I’ve never seen anybody be offended that I’m asking them to repeat. I’ve seen confusion when they repeat and I still can’t hear, irritation maybe at being asked again and again to repeat, or at failing to communicate.

When that happens, I try to give people clearer instructions: for example, I say “for me to understand you easily, get my attention first so that I can look at you” or “if you’re this far from me I probably won’t understand” or “if you’re in another room I probably won’t either”. Or “I’m sorry, even with my hearing aids in my hearing isn’t as good as yours, you need to speak louder for me to be able to understand you.”

I need them to do things differently for me, but if I don’t tell them clearly what it is they need to do, and if I don’t patiently give them feedback, they can’t guess.

How do you deal with this? I think strategies are going to vary a lot depending on the degree of hearing loss we have.

Why Do We Underestimate Hearing Loss? [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

People wait a long time to get fitted with hearing aids. I’m a good example of this, having hearing loss since birth (we guess) but waiting until my 38th year to do so, after figuring out “something was up” with my hearing when I was 13 or so.
hearingloss_underestimate_i
In his article about baby boomers and hearing aids, Steve points to an article in Hearing Review which mentions an average of 7 years waiting in the US between identifying hearing loss and actually getting hearing aids. The article is Right Product; Wrong Message, and you should read it. It’s about how we can try and change the social norm in hearing care, how hearing loss is perceived, etc.

Anyway. I waited, and it seems I’m not alone.

One thing I realised when I got fitted is that I had underestimated how much hearing loss I had. Various conversations I’ve had since then with audiologists at Phonak and other people with hearing loss have led me to believe that this is quite common.

You cannot hear what you cannot hear.

When you lose your eyesight, you still see everything, but it’s blurry.

When you lose your hearing, the sounds you don’t hear just cease to exist. You don’t know you don’t hear them anymore. You can’t “hear” that you didn’t hear the doorbell. You can’t “hear” that you didn’t hear somebody talking to you when you had your back turned.

Another way in which eyes and ears are different.

When hearing degrades, or just wasn’t there in first place, you rely on other people to inform you that they tried speaking to you and you didn’t hear them. Or that they’re not mumbling, they talk like this with “everyone” and only you are making them repeat every second sentence.

We shape our lives around our capacity for hearing. My preference for quiet places and one-on-one situations is not a coïncidence. These are the social situations in which my hearing doesn’t prevent me from communicating and enjoying myself. When I got fitted, one of the things I noticed is that almost all my friends were loud speakers. Funny, eh? Sometimes I think of all the soft-spoken people I never got to know because I simply couldn’t understand them, or maybe didn’t even hear them try to talk to me.

I personally think that one of the major reasons why people wait to get hearing aids, setting economic reasons aside, is that they are not aware of the benefits hearing aids could bring in their lives, because they don’t realise what they’re missing out on because of their hearing loss.

18 mai: ne votez pas oui par ignorance (NON à l'initiative "anti-pédophiles") [fr]

[en] Swiss votations stuff. NO to the so-called "anti-pedophile" initiative which is extremist, badly-designed, and useless when we have laws now in place which do a better job.

Le moment d’envoyer son bulletin pour les votations du 18 mai approche. Et je l’ai “là” comme on dit en pensant à toutes les personnes qui voteront oui à l’initiative de la Marche Blanche, croyant bien faire, parce que bien sûr, il faut être “contre les pédophiles”, mais quelle idée.

Alors qu’en réalité:

  • la loi qui entrera en vigueur en 2015, développée d’ailleurs sous l’impulsion de la Marche Blanche à l’époque, met déjà à l’ordre du jour l’interdiction de travailler avec des enfants pour les pédophiles condamnés et avec des personnes dépendantes pour des personnes en ayant abusé
  • l’initiative bafoue le principe de proportionnalité de la peine au crime, avec une interdiction à vie automatique contraire aux droits de l’homme (ça vous chicane pas juste un petit peu, qu’Amnesty se positionne contre?)
  • les arguments “il ne faut reculer devant rien pour protéger nos enfants” est dangereux, et va dans le sens d’une société et d’une éducation suprotectrices qui s’avère en fait extrêmement dommageable pour l’équilibre de notre jeunesse
  • l’initiative met dans un même sac les amours de jeunesse ou impliquant des ados (genre, 15-21, voire 16-32, on en connaît tous) et la “véritable” pédophilie, ainsi que l’abus de personnes dépendantes; elle est mal écrite, ratisse à la fois trop large et pas assez (abus en milieu familial ou associatif? que dalle, alors qu’on sait que c’est dans le contexte privé qu’il y en a le plus)
  • mettre en place des mesures de prévention ou de protection inutiles est bien pire que de ne pas en mettre: on se donne bonne conscience mais on ne change rien au problème (imaginez qu’on encourage les gens à mettre un grigri à leur rétroviseur plutôt qu’une ceinture de sécurité pour se protéger en cas d’accident… pas dommageable?)
  • je ne parlerai même pas (mais si j’en parle) de la mise au pilori des opposants à l’initiative; je me suis moi-même fait lyncher en bonne et due forme sur Facebook quand j’ai essayé d’introduire un peu de nuance dans le débat.

Je vais voter NON et je vous engage à en faire de même. Les sondages donnent l’initiative gagnante, largement, mais il ne faut pas perdre espoir. Mobilisez-vous. Mobilisez les autres autour de vous. N’acceptez pas la victoire du populisme, de la peur et de l’ignorance.

Certains ont développé bien mieux que moi les arguments contre. Lisez-les.

Et je vous rassure, on n’est pas pédophile ou pro-pédophilie parce qu’on refuse cette initiative.

The First Time I Resented My Hearing Aids [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

It was last week. I guess a two-year love story with my aids is not too bad, so it had to happen someday.

Playground

I was working in my office when a loud alarm-like sound went off. Now, in certain parts of the world this is habitual, but not in this quiet little part of Switzerland. We don’t have house and car alarms going off twenty times a day (we don’t have house or car alarms most of the time). Ambulances and police cars sometimes go by but they won’t use their sirens unless they need them.

We looked at each other in the office, and I hopped out of the ground-level window to investigate. Was this going to involve calling the police?

The noise actually seemed to be coming from the playground, and not the parking lot next to it as I had thought initially. By the time I was close enough it had stopped. I checked out the playground and saw a couple of little kids putting down huge plastic sci-fi guns down. Now that was more plausible than a rogue car alarm: noisy toys. I wandered around the garden a little, searching for one of my cats, when the sound went off again. This time it was clearly coming from the playground, and I could see the kids in full action with their guns, shooting at imaginary hostiles in the bushes.

I made for the playground, called to the kids, and told them off for making so much horrible noise when there were people trying to work or rest in the neighbourhood. We like our peace and quiet here in the land of the Swiss. They looked at each other, at me, shrugged it off, and as I turned to go, I heard a woman calling to me from the balcony three floors above. They were her kids, and she was quite angry at me for telling them off when they were just playing in the playground on a sunny vacation day.

I told her that yes, I had asked them to stop that horrible noise because it was really unpleasant. She went off in a big rant about letting kids play and that I just had to live with it. I told her again that the noise was really bad, and that I was wondering what was going on because it was so loud and sounded so much like an alarm. She wasn’t really listening to me, though, and just ranted back.

That’s when one of the men in the park jumped into the conversation and said it was a car alarm. And I said yes, it sounds like a car alarm, don’t you agree it’s a bit disruptive for “kid’s play”? But he insisted. It was really a car alarm. It wasn’t their toys.

As soon as I realised what a terrible mistake I had made, I immediately apologised profusely, to the mother, and also to the two boys, with whom I double-checked that it wasn’t their guns. They seemed to get it.

The mother didn’t, however. She continued ranting at me even though I was now trying to explain that it was a misunderstanding and I was mortified about having told off the kids who were doing nothing wrong. And of course I would never have told off kids for playing in the park, I only did so because I thought their guns were making this horrible loud noise. I couldn’t get a word in, and I’m usually pretty good at that.

At one point I understood she had no clue which noise I was talking about, and so when the alarm went off again, I pointed it out to her. She clearly thought I was crazy for imagining this noise could come out of a child’s toy and scoffed at my explanation. I wonder now if she thought I was trying to make up an excuse because she had “caught me” telling off the kids for playing?

And then it dawned on me. One piece of information she was missing was my hearing loss and hearing aids. So I tried to tell her. I said “I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing and sometimes I have trouble judging the volume of noises and where they come from.” The ranting didn’t stop, and as by that point I was bursting into tears, I ended up walking off.

Now, there were a bunch of upsetting elements and triggers in this episode for me. I was stressed, preoccupied about something unrelated, and being falsely accused of something (like hating children and not wanting them to enjoy their spring holiday) is one of my big triggers. But what particularly upset me here is that I would never have got myself into this situation if I didn’t have hearing loss and hearing aids.

My world of sound is not imaginable for the angry ranting mother on her balcony. My hearing aids are wonderful when it comes to communicating with people, but two years in (and maybe my fault for not wearing them from morning to evening even when I’m alone?) there are still some ambient sounds which startle me and register as “unknown” because they’re just not at a volume I expect. And despite all the wireless and electronic magic going on in my hearing aids, I do get the feeling that for certain sounds, I have more trouble than I used to identifying their origin.

My hearing loss has long felt like a detail in my life. These last years, particularly since my fitting, have been a journey in realising how much a core part of who I am and how I relate to others has its roots in how much — or little — I hear. I’m used to having one-way communication with children I don’t know, because without hearing aids, I can’t understand a quarter of what they say (and children are not good at all at dealing with an adult who asks them to repeat stuff). Had I approached those boys to talk with them and make sure their guns were making the noise I suspected, things would have been different. But I didn’t, because I’ve learned not to start conversations or ask questions when I’m not going to be able to understand the answer. Had I not been muddled about volume and orientation of the sound I heard, because I can still be surprised at how unexpectedly loud certain sounds can be, I wouldn’t even have suspected the kids for starters. I thought the noise sounded loud to me because I was wearing my hearing aids, not because it actually was that loud.

It hurts to realise that my ears (organic and electronic) can lure me into such socially disastrous situations.

After I’d calmed down a bit, I went back to the playground and approached the kids. I wanted to make extra sure they had understood what the misunderstanding had been, and heard how sorry I was to have wrongly told them off. They had! 🙂

Huit lectures pour comprendre les réseaux sociaux, cuvée 2014 [fr]

[en] Reading recommendations for those who want to understand social media, and social networks, and this online stuff in general.

Pour Grégoire et les autres qui l’ont demandé, voici mes recommandations de lecture 2014 pour “comprendre les réseaux sociaux”. Cette sélection reflète bien entendu mon angle d’approche pour ce qui touche à internet, un sujet qui me fascine depuis 98-99: je ne viens pas du marketing, ni de la comm’, mais du cluetrain. Ce qui m’intéresse ce sont les communautés, les gens, la façon dont la publication personnelle a bouleversé la communication de masse. La sélection est aussi principalement anglophone, parce que, il n’y a pas de miracle, si on veut creuser un peu, il faut passer par l’anglais.

  1. The Cluetrain Manifesto
    Incontournable, épuisé en français (et mal traduit si je me souviens bien), le Cluetrain a plus de 10 ans mais il n’a pas pris une ride quand il s’agit de comprendre les enjeux profonds du monde connecté.
  2. Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web
    Euan est un ami qui a le cluetrain dans le sang. Son livre le distille au fil de petits chapitres digestes mais profonds, fort bienvenus à l’ère de Twitter et des statuts Facebook.
  3. Everything is Miscellaneous
    David Weinberger, co-auteur du Cluetrain Manifesto, explique comment s’organisent tous ces « objets numériques », dans un ordre qui va parfois à l’encontre de notre conception de ce qu’est l’organisation. Un ouvrage important pour comprendre les caractéristiques physiques du monde numérique.
    Lecture complémentaire, sur les bénéfices inattendus du désordre, omniprésent en ligne: A Perfect Mess.
  4. Naked Conversations
    Un livre qui commence à dater un peu mais qui reste néanmoins une splendide collection d’exemples d’utilisation des blogs (et des conversations en ligne) par des entreprises/organisation. Inspiration, exemples concrets, modèles à suivre (ou pas).
  5. It’s Complicated
    J’attendais depuis des années que danah écrive ce livre. A l’époque où je donnais beaucoup de conférences “prévention internet” en milieu scolaire, j’avais apprécié de trouver dans son travail des confirmations un peu plus académiques de mes intuitions. Ce livre est incontournable pour quiconque veut réellement comprendre les enjeux de l’adolescence connectée, au-delà de la paranoïa que nous servent les médias et organisations bien-pensantes genre “sauvez les enfants”.
    Lectures complémentaires sur le thème “ados et internet”: The Culture of Fear, pour une perspective sur comment en faisant peur aux gens, on les rends plus dociles citoyens et consommateurs; Generation Me, une analyse sociologique des générations 70-80-90; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, le point sur la recherche “ados et internet” il y a quelques années et EU Kids Online, groupe de recherche européen équivalent.
  6. L’intimité au travail: la vie privée et les communications personnelles dans l’entreprise
    Avec les nouvelles technologies de la communication, les sacro-saintes frontières entre “privé” et “professionnel” s’effritent. Eclairage ethnologique très éclairant. Spoiler: non, ce n’est pas la fin du monde.
  7. Le peuple des connecteurs: Ils ne votent pas, ils n’étudient pas, ils ne travaillent pas… mais ils changent le monde
    Comprendre les réseaux sociaux en ligne, c’est comprendre les réseaux tout court, et la complexité. Tour d’horizon en français avec Thierry Crouzet, auteur expert de rien.
  8. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
    On ne peut pas comprendre les réseaux sociaux sans regarder de près la façon dont la technologie a bouleversé l’auto-organisation et le passage à l’action collectif.
    Lectures complémentaires pour mieux comprendre les humains dans les réseaux: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, qui met le doigt sur les réactions humaines illogiques mais très prévisibles qui nous rendent vulnérables à la manipulation; Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, ouvrage précieux pour qui doit gérer des communautés ou obtenir des résultats; The Paradox of Choice: Why Less Is More, indispensable dans ce monde numérique où pléthore de choix n’est que le début du problème, et enfin Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, pour comprendre de quoi est faite la motivation, et que le bâton et la carotte ne sont pas des stratégies gagnantes.

Il y a plein d’autres livres qui sont sûrement très bien, mais ceux-ci ont été testés et approuvés et je les recommande comme valeurs sûres!

Bonne lecture 🙂