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November 05, 2006
An excellent article on ipods by Charlie Bertsch at Alternet. It is entitled, 'The iPod's Moment in History', and it expresses what I've been struggling with about this "lifestyle" product that is now everywhere.
I have noticed that the existence of traditional audiophiles is under threat--the shops that sell high quality equipment have all closed down in Adelaide. The mourning owners say that it is due to digital music and the MP3 format. However, it is the way we use the ipod in public spaces in Sydney that causes my unease.
My unease about an ipod world is not because this MP3 player does not increase participation in the public sphere , so as to enable citizens of a democratic state to contribute actively to the formation of critical public opinion and so influence the state's actions.
Bertsch, a writer over at Bad Subjects and co-editor of Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life anthology, rightly says:
It is impossible to make sense of the contemporary culture industry without putting the iPod center stage. Even those music lovers who have no interest in using one, either because they are unsatisfied with its limited fidelity or because they aren't interested in mobility, must confront the fact that the choices available to them are constrained by the iPod's influence on the market. Indeed, the very existence of traditional audiophiles is threatened, since the criteria they use for rating both equipment and recording are no longer a high priority for most listeners. Frequency response, the accuracy of microphones, the virtuosity of musicians -- the bread and butter of "serious" music magazines from the late 1940s until the popularization of the MP3 format -- have become secondary or tertiary considerations in a context where the most important thing is not how good the music sounds, but how readily it is available to you.
It is all about mobility isn't it. Being at home with oneself whilst living a nomadic existence in public spaces. Music is our identity.
Bertsch, says that if the iPod is often used to protect us in public, then the use of iPods also minimizes the possibility for social interaction with others:
As cultural critics are fond of pointing out, the German title of Sigmund Freud's famous essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, translates literally as "the un-home-like." That's an apt description of the eerie feeling we get watching people who sit for hours staring blankly into space, ears plugged with music of their choosing, looking like they've lost the passage back to the place they were before. They are out in public, to be sure, but primarily to act out their desire for privacy. Maybe what these listeners want is to be seen wanting both company and solitude.
It's the beginnings of a phenomenology of everyday life in postmodernity isn't it; one that links backs to Adorno's Minima Moralia.
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I don't own an ipod - too expensive. I have earphones, though, that I plug into my laptop and use to listen to music and other recordings on public transport and in places like libraries.
Many of the things you mention (isolation in public places or in transit, mobility of the personal space, poor sound quality) could just as well be said of cars fitted with stereos.
I'm equally suspicious of the obsession with possessing ipods and of claims that they are a privileged emblem of a major cultural dysfunction. Both points of view seem to me to give Apple too much credit and attention!