By now an estimated nine billion people have told us how much they love their iPods – bloggers, columnists and music journalists are the worst offenders. Even complete strangers are willing to tell you at the drop of a hat how they really feel about their relationship to the ubiquitous Apple gadget.
For a while I thought that it is because our relationship to technology is now such that we not only use it, we befriend it. Our phones and laptops and cameras are our buddies, or better, our meta-buddies that connect us to the distant contemporaries we call our friends. Maybe in this scheme, music players are anti-buddies; the two white buds stand for pristine isolation, a rare disconnectedness. But I'm sure you've read something like this before.
It's something else entirely, though – not a product or a relationship, but an event. It's a pervasive ritual that ties soundtracks into our motions and reclaims the public as private. No where more so than on public transit – step on onto a bus or a subway and you will see an uncommunity of commuters. This is the event of our generation, it's our Woodstock – for an audience of one.
