Meaning of "or we have headphones or we don't, so..."

Question

I've run into this sentence and don't understand the meaning of "or we have headphones or we don't, so...". It's like some logical issue here that I cannot comprehend

The web is a very visual environment,” he says, “and not enough people pay attention to sound and the very usefulness and power of sound – partly because we’re living in a house with other people, or we have headphones on or we don’t, so we turn off the sound, or we’re sitting in an office environment with other people and take the sound off.

Answer 1

As Yosef commented, this is transcribed speech, so the grammar won't be perfectly correct; it's more like a stream of consciousness or a run-on sentence. Also, I suspect it's slightly mispunctuated. I hear it better in my head like this:

“The web is a very visual environment,” he says, “and not enough people pay attention to sound and the very usefulness and power of sound. Partly because we’re living in a house with other people, or we have headphones on; or we don’t, so we turn off the sound; or we’re sitting in an office environment with other people and take the sound off.

Rewritten without the disjointed stream-of-consciousness grammar, it might come out more like:

“The web is a very visual environment,” he says, “and not enough people pay attention to sound, and to the way sound is very useful and powerful. This could be because we’re in a house or an office environment with other people, so we have headphones on [so as not to disturb them]. Or we don’t have headphones on [and still don't want to disturb our housemates], so we turn off the sound entirely. [Either way, we're not getting a full surround-sound experience.]”

Answer 2

I think that the subordinating conjunction "because" introduces a series of subordinate clauses separated by "or" (polysyndeton):

1. we’re living in a house with other people
2. we have headphones on
3. we don’t, so we turn off the sound,
4. we’re sitting in an office environment with other people and take the sound off

What seems most unusual to me is the comma immediately before the first "or". I suspect that the author was trying to group the 2nd and 3rd conjuncts together by surrounding them with paired commas. (The second comma of that pair is, of course, absorbed into the comma at the end of the third conjunct, which is part of a pair surrounding the parenthetical phrase "so we turn off the sound".)

Answer 3

The quotation is from an article published in 2016 that quotes several people who were apparently interviewed for the article. I would conclude that the interviewees are being quoted as they spoke, without rewriting their sentences—but without quoting everything they said.

It’s also carefully written to make a number of points on the use of audio on the web and why the web is primarily a visual medium.

That is the broader context within which the quotation can be understood.

This particular interviewee, Dr. Kevin Walker, the head of the Information Experience Design (IED) program at London’s Royal College of Art, is explaining why people turn off the sound while viewing the web—they don’t have headphones on, and they are in an environment with other people—a house or office.

“. . . or they don’t” can be understood as the speaker correcting himself when he starts out saying they have headphones on.

Answer 4

Probably this was translated from another language. Some languages do use the same word in the "either/or" construction.

French: soit ... soit
Dutch: of ... of
Russian: либо ... либо

BUT

German: entweder ... oder
Swedish: ‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎a‎n‎t‎i‎n‎g‎e‎n‎‎‎‎ ... eller
Danish: enten ... eller
English: either ... or

Answer 5

The web is a very visual environment,” he says, “and not enough people pay attention to sound and the very usefulness and power of sound – partly because we’re living in a house with other people, or we have headphones on or we don’t, so we turn off the sound, or we’re sitting in an office environment with other people and take the sound off.

The speaker is saying that in general, sound is not used much on the internet because of the many reasons people have for leaving their sound off.

They are listing the possible reasons people don't use sound on their computers normally, mixed with cases where they might be able to do so.

• They live in a house with other people who won't appreciate the noise
• We have headphones (so we can listen to sound)
• We don't have headphones on at the moment for whatever reason
• We're in an office-environment where the noise would be intrusive

It's a grammatical mess and it doesn't make sense when read literally.

As other answers suggest, this is a stream-of-consciousness sentence, the speaker has not taken the time to formulate his answer clearly and is producing words that sound roughly like what he's trying to express but don't quite work when you look closer.

Answer 6

In formal written English, the way to disambiguate a list like this would be to use semicolons to separate the list of clauses that contain commas, like so:

[...] partly because we’re living in a house with other people; or we have headphones on; or we don’t, so we turn off the sound; or we’re sitting in an office environment with other people and take the sound off.

This isn’t as widely used these days, but makes clearer that “or we don’t, so we turn off the sound” is an item in the list, parallel to “or we have headphones on” and “or we’re sitting in an office environment with other people and take the sound off.”

The inconsistent use of commas in the original—some items in the list have no comma between them, and one item in the list has a comma in it—does make it harder to parse than it needs to be.

Answer 7

Poorly-constructed sentence.

In clear English :

The web is a very visual environment,” he says, “and not enough people pay attention to sound and the very usefulness and power of sound.

That is because very often we are not offered the option to browse the Internet with sound.

The reasons can be many : Sometimes it's because we’re surrounded with other people -- Because we live in a shared house, or because we find ourselves in an office environment for example. Sometimes it's simply because we don't own headphones, or can't use them for whatever reason. In all those situations, we have to turn off the sound of the computer's speakers.