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.
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I actually think the defining thing about our generation is having lived through the y2k scare. Technology was going to fail us, and we'd be living in the familiar post-apocalyptic wasteland (where anything can be used as a weapon, even like, emotions!)of 80's sci-fi. But that is pretty much what it's felt like, in a more metaphorical way. I mean the future is now, and we're all sort of thunderdome contestants. I think the next couple of years will be socially repressive, while we come to terms with the fact that technology and morality have no relationship whatsoever. I guess I'm trying to say, I don't have an i-pod.
I like that idea but I'd take it in another direction - after the secret disappointment in an entire world's failure to end in 2000, maybe we're complacent - a generation that completely eschews the eschatological.
Then again, Al Gore, terrists, bird flu, etc.
Also, it's not about having an ipod; it's about the eagerness people have to talk about theirs. And there really is no escaping that.
I wouldn't go so far as to call this thing a "Woodstock." Remember that Woodstock stands out in communal memory as some sort of watershed--everyone that was there was too fucked at the time to really remember what was important about it, and everyone that wasn't either wishes they were or can't stop stumbling over themselves to claim its significance. A bunch of hippies writhing around in the mud became a symbol whose lack of importance everybody is vaguely embarrassed to admit to.
The white buds, however, do have a generational throwback to the sixties. The whole turn off, tune in, drop out thing (that some decry Woodstock as having been all about) is warped by rampant consumerism into turn on, tune out, plug in. iPods are meant to stand out (being white and all), and as such make both the statements "I can afford this gadgety thing" and "I am listening to it, so leave me alone." By plugging into your personalized soundtrack, you can turn the commute into your own psychedelic space machine, introverting everybody away from the monotony of modular assembly, brushed aluminum, and molded plastic that iterates itself within the bowels of major cities.
Basically, by plugging into your iPod and zoning out of direct contact with the world, you literally plug into something larger. The main difference between this and walkmans of a few decades back is the massive popularity of one single product. On par with the Model-T, this gottahave is now a symbol of participation--one that is particularly encouraged by Apple. The iPod itself isn't to blame for any of this, but its pervasiveness in other media for keeping closest friends at arm's length (i.e. online communities, whether music-centered or not) as well as situations for keeping strangers out of your bubble (the public transport thing) is both what makes it hip and what sanitizes our daily relations.
I had a point here... it probably had to do with sheeple and corporate misdirection meddling with our social relationships. In the end, I still listen to mixtapes on my walkman and consider myself far hipper than the iPeople.
But then again Al, you acquired a discman so you could listen to Aerosmith so I'm taking your opinion with a grain of salt
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