Are iPods Antisocial?

A Short History of Recorded Sound: Part II 

Many of us remember the 80s and by far one its highlights was the advent of the Walkman. Seemingly ubiquitous overnight – well, I may have begun to form permanent memories at that point, so that’s just my take on it – the Walkman took what was already a good thing, the cassette, and made it that much better. A beautiful object of industrial design, the feeling of holding an early Walkman must have rivaled that of the iPod itself. A robust mechanical box a mere few times the size of the re-recordable cassette it held within, the Walkman was the ultimate in portability, even if it didn’t yet quite fit in your pocket. While radio and portable cassette decks had split the listening audiences into tiny splinters, the teens giggling in their rooms, dads rockin’ out in the garage, and mom with her NPR pacifier always in the background, the Walkman transgressed all remaining boundaries (well, except the shower). Now listening to music was possible not only in isolation, but as a force of isolation. The street, the sidewalk, the supermarket all were transformed from necessarily public spheres into semi-private ones, where you no longer had to fear eye contact or the possibility of someone asking you a question.  

For many – especially the shy and misogynistic among us – this was a godsend. And commuters, lawn-care personnel, and bus drivers around the industrialized world were partially relieved from the drudgery of their duties. But the flip-side of this was a diminution of social interaction. The Walkman made people antisocial. Our social interactions are based on many media – body language, facial expression, clothing, even an aura or mood, if you will – but prominent among them is the auditory realm of listening and speaking. The Walkman shut this off. With Michael Jackson deftly filling out Quincy Jones’ best-laid plans in your cans, honking horns, public announcements, and, primarily, speech was filtered out. That channel was turned off. Thus, in a certain regard the iPod was nothing new. Ok, its beauty matched the minimalist sensibilities of the 90s – desperately needed as the world itself became paralyzingly complex. And, yes, it prevented us from having to carry other tapes in our hip packs. Agreed, it fit in a pocket every so easily. But, these were not differences of kind. 

What I want to argue, however, is that beyond a certain threshold differences in degree become differences in kind. That it to say, yes, the Walkman was also a portable music listening device that removed people into their own isolated worlds, but the iPod’s ubiquity has pushed the social body into a new realm: publicness is disappearing, monism is on the rise. Lest you think I want to make some sort of logical argumet here about why such a threshold exists and what proves we’ve crossed it, let me disappoint you. To follow the advice of the philosopher Bert Dreyfus, I intend to “Stick to the phenomena!” Walk down the street (if you happen to live somewhere where people do that), or sit on some form of public transportation, or go even to a local mall or cafe and what you will find today are not people, but isolated persons. The martian from outer space would report that the humans seem unable to walk around in public without little wires streaming down from their ears. Is it fashion? Is the sound of the social just too scary? What has changed here on Earth? On my last visit they still seemed to be able to talk to each other, to look at each other, to stand the being of one another. 

That this is the case, I will allow you all to confirm or deny for yourself. Certainly this phenomenon is more developed in urban areas in the industrial West and less developed elsewhere. But, I contend, the trend is inexorable, for just as the Walkman was replaced, so is the iPod on the verge of its certain death. Approximately 120 million mp3 players of various sorts are estimated to be in use around the globe. Of our world population that is relatively insignificant. But roughly 1.5 billion people carry a cell phone, making it more common by a factor of ten. Thus when all those cell phones are traded in for new music-capable ones in the coming years, the phenomenon described above will only accelerate. Perhaps the public sphere will disappear all together. A recent article in the journal Technology Review spoke of contact lenses that would allow visual information to be laid over what the wearer sees. When we all listen to our smartphones and read email off our contact lenses, hopefully our bodies will still be able to guide us along the street. Maybe we’ll be able to go door-to-door without registering the existence of even one other being. Wouldn’t that be a relief?  

Are iPods Antisocial?

 

A Short History of Recorded Sound and Practice: Part I

 

Let’s face it. Until the middle of our last, wonderful century listen to music was a social activity. Cheap radios, Walkmen, and iPods have changed that. Now we listen alone. What have we lost?

 

Of course people have always sung to themselves, whether in the shower or the brook nearby, while musicians have sat alone and played only for themselves. Music as a solitary experience was not unknown before the 20th century. It was just rare. Edison invented the first working device to record sound in 1877. His cyclinder gramophone was designed as an early answering machine – for telegraphists unable to take down multiple incoming messages at once – but, as is so often the case, its revolutionary power was felt elsewhere. Indeed it wasn’t until more than 10 years later that a bright manager of his in San Fransisco decided people might enjoy listening to sounds for entertainment that its possibilities for music were even explored. In these so-called “sound parlors” one could pay a small fee to sit around a phonograph outfitted with five listening horns and hear the sound of animals, human voices, and music too. To these earliest of recorded media listeners the novelty and strangeness was the point. A player piano was comprehensible as a mechanical device that activated the keys, but how sound was captured on a small cylinder of cardboard and wax was a pure wonderment at the turn of the century.

 

Within a decade or two of the first sound parlors cylinder and disc gramophones became public commonplaces. Found in cafes and living rooms people quickly developed a taste for listening to Caruso or Bessie Smith – the world’s finest entertainers and musicians – in the comfort of their locales. But listening still remained a social activity. Slowly replacing the piano that had been the center of social activity, people were accustomed to gathering together for musical entertainment, sharing in the experience, and, presumably, singing and dancing along.

 

What began to change this was the invention of the transistor. Building on “borrowed” 1925 patent papers from the physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, researchers at Bell Labs created the first working model in 1947, and production began soon thereafter. The transistor is, in essence, just an amplification circuit, but one much smaller and durable than the vacuum tubes it replaced. This allowed for the miniaturization of electronic devices which continues to this day. But its immediate impact was on the radio. Radio had taken off during the 20s and become a major source of entertainment, especially during the years of the Great Depression. Much as they did with the piano and gramophone, people gathered together for entertainment, dancing, and socialization in homes and cafes listening to live concerts broadcast over the air waves. But, as we all know from antique stores, vacuum tube radios were large, heavy devices that needed to be plugged into the wall. Transistors allowed radios to be made small, light-weight, and battery-powered. Listening was becoming a more solitary activity.

 

Not just for stealing away to one’s room or listening in the park on a sunny day, the portable radio had a significant role in the development of a separate youth culture. When only one device was in each house and families listened together there was a tendency towards compromise. Everyone listened to the same things, and you’ll bet the elders had more say. The transistor radio circumvented this necessity allowing the younger generation to listen to their own music and radio shows, whether the parents and grandparents liked it or not. It was no longer any of their business. Be it in pairs or huddled under the bed sheets late at night, listening to music had moved out of the living room, out of the larger social realm towards the private.

 

In the next part we’ll move on to the Walkman and the iPod. Certainly though if anyone has any comments I’d love to hear them.