Earlier this spring, I bought my daughter an iPod. Apparently, she had been the only person under 25 not to already own one, but that was mostly by her own request. She was happy with her CD player, and kept saying she didn’t want an iPod. Until recently. Buying one for her provided me the opportunity to see how these omnipresent things work, and to ponder the impact they’ve had on our world.

It’s an impressive concept, to be able to pack 1000 songs onto a device barely larger than a credit card, and I would think that would be more than enough for anyone. Apparently not, as it wasn’t very long before her 4gb unit was full. That’s not a reason to buy her a new, larger one, though. She can rotate her music libraries as she wishes. It would be nice if you could pop an SD card into the unit, to add capacity, but that would probably reduce Apple’s revenues, so they don’t offer that option.

These iPods are everywhere, of course, and it’s hard to find anyone on a college campus or at a high school bus stop without wires coming out of their ears. It seems to me that this promotes an isolationist trend, each person listening to their own music, not talking, not interacting, just listening. One of the really nice teenage memories for many of us would be sharing music with our friends, discovering new releases, trying to discern lyrics, and so on. But today, everyone is on their own channel, and I think that’s sad.

I have occasionally seen an iPod user offer one earbud to a friend to share what is playing. Seems a bit unsanitary, and all that’s being provided is one side of the recording. “Here - you listen to the left half, and I’ll listen to the right. I’ve got the drums. Do you have the bass?”

I wonder what high school dances are like these days. I assume that they still have either a band or a DJ, but there has to be some percentage of the kids who play their iPods, most likely at a very high volume, over the music provided to the crowd. Maybe soon, they won’t need to hire anyone for these events. Each student can just bring their own iPod and dance to their own music. It might not even look any stranger than what’s out there now!

We’ve seen iPods at the gym, at the mall, on joggers and bicyclers, and, rather disturbingly, on drivers as well. That latter behavior may be no different from listening to the radio, but if the volume is too high, or if it otherwise blocks out some important sounds (like emergency vehicle sirens), it could be troublesome. Of course, I’ve seen people on the highway reading a newspaper while driving, so one can always push the limits farther and farther.

I don’t own an iPod myself. I probably should get one, because, as we know, he who dies with the most toys wins. But I’ve always preferred listening to music selected by others, to hear something new, or something I haven’t heard in many years, as opposed to recycling my own collection of CDs, LPs, and 45s. (Yes, I have a few hundred LPs and an equal number of 45-rpm records from the 1960’s, and I also have a device to transfer them to mp3 files. All I need is the time…) Sirius Radio provides me a good variety, without annoying local DJs or commercials to boot!

We’ve seen our sound media evolve from vinyl records to 8-track tape to cassettes to CDs and now to digital files. It all seems like reasonable progress to me. I just wonder where we will turn for our album art.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Al. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.