Little iPod looms large in American culture

By Dan Buccino

January 14, 2005

THE APPLE iPod digital music player was the hot item this past holiday season, moving 4.5 million units. From Hollywood hipsters to Washington deal-makers to middle America's middle-schoolers, the iPod was the gift to give or get -- if you could get it. The spectacular success of the fetish object of the moment raises interesting questions about the state of our culture.

The iPod is just expensive enough to be chic, like luxury perfume, and just hard enough to get to be coveted, like last winter's Ugg boots. This combination of price and inaccessibility creates a hyperventilated demand, especially if one is searching for a particularly hard-to-get color in the iPod mini, such as pink. Yet the iPods are not too expensive for everyone to imagine owning one, and, as Apple Computer has just announced a pack-of-gum-size "iPod Shuffle" at $99, everyone soon will.

iPods are sleek and shiny enough to be a fashion talisman, yet in their resemblance to a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards, they evoke a whiff of decadence. The tell-tale white cords of the iPod's ear-buds are this season's equivalent of Lance Armstrong's obligatory accessory: the yellow "LiveSTRONG" bracelet.

The iPods are so elegantly engineered and easy to use that they reportedly own 65 percent of the portable digital music player market. More than its new value-priced, "headless" desktops or funky laptops, the iPod will be Apple's leading edge against Microsoft's market dominance. Why bother with glitchy PC programs when the iPod offers such style and simplicity?

Insofar as the 20- and 40-gigabyte iPods function as external hard-drives, not just single-function, "flash memory" music players, early adapters can carry their music, images and data in a single, shiny oblong box.

More than anything, however, the iPod is driving another evolution in popular music. The song -- the single -- has become dominant again, as it was in the golden age of the 7-inch, 45-rpm vinyl record and AM radio. It's likely we'll see more one-hit wonders since it is increasingly old-fashioned to expect listeners to have the patience to listen to an entire album.

"What's on your iPod?" is the conversational icebreaker among many these days. Just as the iPod is a fashionable accessory, what's on the iPod can make or break a relationship.

Especially for music aficionados, questions arise as to what to load onto the iPod. Do I add all four discs of the Thin Lizzy box set or just select cuts from each one? Do I load the iPod with strong singles that work well in the gym, or do I burn Aaron Copland's complete works? The idea of appreciating an album as an organic whole reflective of an artist's intentions has become a hopelessly 1960s anachronism.

The shuffle feature on the iPod can recontextualize a music library in more random ways than even a multidisc CD changer can, and it does so in such unexpected and exciting ways that many have thought there must be an intelligent "ghost in the machine," or at least a personal DJ.

Despite the efforts of some companies that are incorporating iPod technology into car stereo and home entertainment systems for shared listening, the iPod reinforces the same isolation that cell phones do. Marching or exercising or riding to the beat of their own drummers, iPod users are as cut off from the public space as cell phone users. Whether tuning others out quietly with one's personal iPod soundtrack or tuning others out loudly with one-sided cell chatter, attunement to others is minimized and the potential for disrespect increased.

Since there is no longer a shared aural environment, people have become insensitive to the incivility of excess noise. Music and conversation are shared less and less often, especially in public spaces. As we retire to our gated communities in private, we retreat into our personal electronics bubbles in public.

The iPod is the perfection of mass customization. Everybody gets the same thing yet everybody thinks his or hers is hipper than anyone else's. Just as George Orwell's 1984 warned that "Big Brother is watching you," the iPod reveals that big brother is now you, listening.

Dan Buccino is a founder and director of the Baltimore Psychotherapy Institute and a clinical social worker on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Maryland School of Social Work.