Mosquito
Final exams are upon those of us who live in the Netherlands and try to graduate high school. Mine are extremely stressful and I’m way too busy and tired every day to write lengthy blog posts. Nevertheless, that’s no excuse for ignoring my blog for, oh let’s say, two months. Anyways.
While I was doing an additional course to see if I could raise my level of math understanding I walked around Leiden (small city in this country) for a bit and found a school. Because it was saturday the school was closed, but the steps to the front door were nice and sun covered so I decided to sit there and have dinner. (When I’m traveling alone my dinner usually consists of sandwiches or soup, in this case amazing tomato soup from Lebkov & Sons (check them out), but that’s another story.)
This school has a so called Mosquito hanging outside. It’s apparently a device that produces a high frequency tone that can only be heard by those under 25 and this sound is supposedly so annoying that teenagers can’t be around it. I personally didn’t really mind the thing, it was a bit annoying to be honest but not to the level which would ‘repel’ me. I’ve been to a lot of concerts recently and I don’t really pay too much attention to how loud my headphones are, but I highly doubt my hearing is very impaired. However, let’s think about this for a second. If we allow people to use this device, which physically drives one particular age group of away, what’s next? It was invented to keep groups of ‘unruly’ teens away from shops and public areas, what about those who just wanted to do their shopping? With this device you do not repel abusive, violent or drunk individuals, but an entire age group.
In a tiny, tiny village called Oude Pekela a small shopping centre was suffering from so called ‘hangouderen’ which in essence means old people hanging around. They made loud comments about those who passed by and judged what people had in their carts. If we’re allowed to physically drive away young people with high pitched audio, what do we do with the annoying old people? Taser them?
Although I’m not really troubled by the sound the Mosquito makes, devices like these do not belong in public areas. Like the name says, they’re public. They need to be accessable for everyone, not just people over the age of 25. Even if one would want to stop teens and adolecents from going to these places, this is not the way to do it.