The manager at a tony Manhattan department store called it “the disease of the ’80s.”[40] A CBS record executive declared that it was “the end of meeting people. It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”[41] “In seeking a sort of emotional climate control wherever we go,” one critic asked, “are we not simply proving anew our growing determination not to deal with one another?”
