The musical echo chamber
: The Toronto Star says that the Walkman is the original echo chamber:
In many ways, the Walkman and its spawn
20 responses to “The musical echo chamber”
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Oh good god, I can’t believe they dug up this Reagan-era canard. Have they run out of twenty-first century issues to gripe about?
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similar opinion: “The day the Walkman landed was the day the music began to die…”
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=835692004 -
And there’s certainly no advantage in having conversations on subways instead of listening to my own music; such conversations usually lead to homicide.
Cripes, no wonder no one ever talks on the subway. -
Wrong. This process started, if it started at all, or was started by one piece of technology, with the transistor radio. The radio a kid could carry up to his ear to listen to his favorite radio station. Sure, he couldn’t pick the songs, but he could pick the station, and it wasn’t the station his parents listened to, and it probably wasn’t even the station his older sister listened to. It was his station. The top 40 station he associated his own personal brand to and established his identity among the crowd he choose to hang with. In San Diego, where I grew up, it was a very different crowd that listened to KGB-AM than listened to KCBQ-AM, though they were both top 40 stations.
But you could take this process back even further, to the first 45 RPM record and the birth of rock and roll … individuation really began to roll then. The transistor was the next logical step, and the walkman certainly took it a step further.
But the hallmark of American culture is indivduation … Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, etc. The celebration of the individual over society is a uniquely American invention and is what the Imans in Saudi Arabia hate the most about us. The iPod is just the logical manifestation what was was started by the Mayflower. -
Why does it not suprise me that professors and sociology types dislike an invention that emphasizes personilization and individual choice….
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“Personalized consumption and the relentless individualization of technology over the past 25 years can easily…”
You can just hear the sneer in way that word, individualization, is pronounced. What a f***tard. -
Not just individualization, it’s RELENTLESSS individualization!
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The advent of the Walkman brought about at least one wonderful result — the death of the boombox.
Boomboxes provided for plenty of wonderful communal listening opportunities, often in parks and buses.
Count me quite happy that the little beggars now keep their music to themselves. -
“Relentless individualization” – veiled in sociability – is all around us. Blogs are the epitome: an individual publishing her own, individual, thoughts & ideas & commentaries, thinly disguised as a “social media” simply becuase there are comment sections and the ability for other people to link to her. A truly social media wouldn’t need to be identifiable to one person (“Sally’s Blog”) and would let anyone start a conversation. Perhaps a wiki site, or a place like e.thepeople gets us closer to that ideal.
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Why do some people want to dictate life’s soundtrack to everyone else?
I am an adult, I will pick my own thankyouverymuch.
Authoritarian wannabes. -
“such conversations usually lead to homicide. ”
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That’s just a joke, right? -
Perhaps a wiki site, or a place like e.thepeople gets us closer to that ideal.
Why should we get closer to that ideal? -
Sortelli: Becuase they allow collaborative two-way conversations. Blogs are close, but the biggest problem is that I can’t initiate a conversation on Buzzmachine, I can only react to what Jeff starts. With wikis (as I understand them), we all have equal access.
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Mike Zimmer: I’ve heard that you could do it face to face with actual people too, using this odd manner of communication called “talking.” Weird, I know.
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I’m with you on that 100%, Andrea. If only we could get Jeff to take off his iPod headphones and actually talk to someone on the subway… :)
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We’re having a conversation right now, and we’re not doing it on a “truly social media”. Jeff could kick us out or delete our posts or one of us could wander off without replying, but yet the conversation is happening anyway. So chalk me up for relentless individualization over social media any day. I don’t want my social life dictated by the lowest common denominator of human interaction. :) I want a door to slam in the face of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I want headphones to drown out conversations I don’t wish to hear. I want to control the content in my own little slice of the internet with an iron grip! For me, it’s not an ideal to create this big grand conversation or the world’s largest echo chamber… in the end, what’s the point of social interaction or collaborative conversations if we’re not all relentless individuals?
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I am just worried that the internet could become the most benevolent totalitarism that humanity ever encountered. Its real danger is that it is so benign, that it will be upon us before we even think about it.
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I’m as big a fan of individualism as anyone, but the Walkman and it’s legion of personal music listening device descendents has, I believe, been instrumental in obscuring the necessarily social context in which our individualism is expressed. I’ve certainly found uses for the things, but I think Dr. Turner makes a good point when she writes, speaking of adolescents, that they “allowed them to escape from the world…For the first time they could listen to their personalized music selections on homemade tapes wherever they went. They could reinforce their self-image by focusing only on the music that contained the codes and messages they needed or wanted.” While this is certainly a legitimate avenue of personal expression, attention should be paid to the social cost: people in social spaces, but cut off from having anything to do with anything else going on. I value individualism because I value the cacophony of difference and the wholly unpredictable things that result when those differences collide. By isolating people into their personal audio shells, Walkmans hinder the often uncomfortable, but often productive exchanges, confrontations and surprises out of which society regenerates itself. The desire to constantly control ones audio space, exemplified by those who never leave home without their Walkman and headphones, is, I believe, not a true expression of individualism, but instead a denial of difference – the essense of individualism – in favour of a pre-manufactured monotony.
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“I’ve certainly found uses for the things,”
You can even play music tapes or cds on them. Unless you’ve been using them as planters or kitchen trivets. -
By isolating people into their personal audio shells, Walkmans hinder the often uncomfortable, but often productive exchanges, confrontations and surprises out of which society regenerates itself.
If a walkman isolates someone, think of the damage home-ownership is doing to our society! People are buying entire buildings to shut themselves up in! Call the professor!
