Hell Is Other iPods

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iPodistas like to talk up the social benefits of iPod-jacking: Total strangers swap iPods for a moment to listen to each other's selections. Well, okay. The utter hell of having to listen to strangers' music collections while standing close to them without talking in public notwithstanding, such an idea proceeds from the premise that it is the iPod that has offered this epochal opportunity for social interaction. It was, I am given to understand, entirely possible even before the iPod to approach a stranger on the street and attempt to swap words, names, or even ideas in a form of "tuning in" known as a conversation. A celebration of the joys of iPod-jacking seems a final acceptance that the possibility of actually communicating is gone for good, and we are left with a pale facsimile: You play me yours and I'll play you mine.

"This is all part of the shift from mass media to personalized media," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and director of the Institute of the Future. No doubt this is true, but is it, I wonder, a good thing? For all the cachet and control implied by the iPod, the laptop, the BlackBerry, the digital camera, and wi-fi, in the end what seems to be on offer are particular kinds of distraction and avoidance, and a peculiar kind of 21st-century digital loneliness.

Or am I just grumpy because no one bought me an iPod for Christmas?

Caspar Melville is executive editor of openDemocracy.net, an online magazine of politics and culture. Reprinted from New Humanist (March/April 2005), the bimonthly journal of the Rationalist Press Association. Subscriptions: £18/yr. (6 issues) from 1 Gower St., London, WC1N 6BR; United Kingdom; www.newhumanist.org.uk.

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