Hell Is Other iPods

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Here's my real objection. The iPod is an example of a beautifully designed, convenient, and desirable object that promises to make our lives better, but whose promise, on reflection, as is so often the case, turns out to reinforce the worst in our already denuded culture. In an age of atomization and social fragmentation it reinforces solipsism and places the individual and that dreaded value "choice" at the heart of experience; it suggests connection -- always the implicit promise of the digital age -- while enforcing separation; it encourages people to "tune out" while they're occupying social space with others, as if the others were mere irritations; and it reduces the experience of music, which in my view is an inherently social and collaborative art and medium, to a preselected relationship with the self.

The iPod shares this severe limitation with all post-Walkman personal stereos. They personalize, indeed privatize, music, which really comes to life only when it is public, shared, and collaborative. A large part of the joy of discovering good new music is simultaneously anticipating the pleasure of sharing it with someone else. Anything else is masturbation. Overstated? Try this statement from one user: "With the iPod the Buddha is in the details. The finish and the feel are such that you want to caress it. And when you do, wonderful things happen."

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein has a theory about the Internet that he calls "The Daily We." The argument is that rather than broaden our access to information, ideas, and experiences, the Internet, precisely because it offers such dizzying, disorienting choice and possibility, reinforces the tendency to filter out what is unknown, stick to what you like, and congregate with others who like the same thing.

A similar argument could be made for the "iPod jukebox." Unlike listening to (good) radio, which could infuriate and surprise you in equal measure, the iPod jukebox protects you from the shocks, both highs and lows; it offers you a safe experience that flatters, because every good track was one you chose, every familiar song reminds you of an emotion or memory: yours. Never did I think I'd find myself sounding so much like that old Frankfurt school philosopher-grump Theodor Adorno, but his argument that pop music and its predictable structure deliver back to the user a cheap thrill because he or she recognizes how it will end seems to work for the iPod.

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