spatial awareness vs MP3 (the rant remix)

Amongst my fellows I have a reputation as somewhat of a Luddite-technophobe: when I produce my mobile phone, people actually laugh, but she only needs charging once a week and you could bury her in the sand, dig her up three months later, scrape the gunk off and she'd work just fine...
Remember Walkmans (or should that be Walkmen?) and how cool they were? Generally, it was just your teenage music afficionado who was in possession of one of these, and quite frankly, they were so bulky that you had to really want to wear one, you know? Then came personal CD players which were actually rather worse because they skipped and were larger than their predecessors which again meant their use was fairly limited. Now of course, there are MP3 players, iPods and all those tiny gizmos...
You can tell when someone's wearing one. Not right away though. You're walking along the pavement, maybe in a bit of a hurry. Someone is dawdling in front. Normally, by dint of hearing, the slow-lane type is able to detect your coming, and can shift over a bit, I can nod and say "cheers" and on I go. But now,  you can practically be breathing down someone's collar, bobbing about behind them like like a wallaby looking over a high wall, trying to get past and of course the old "excuse me" goes completely unheard...
Spatial awareness people. It's necessary to our survival to be able to hear stuff coming along, muggers, big trucks, angry dogs and the like...and it's kind of nice to hear the world don't you think? Rather than being forever coccooned in noises of your choice on "shuffle"?  Unplug a while, I say, and give your ears a break. And me. Rant over.