This was composed as a comment to a post Charlie made on his blog about his iPod essay, but LiveJournal barked at me and said it was too long, so I guess I’ll post it here. If you missed it, go read Charlie’s essay first, or a lot of what follows won’t make sense (besides which, it’s a good piece, it doesn’t need my commentary). Also, in a couple of places, I refer to “you” … that means “Charlie,” like I say, this started as a comment on his blog.
[ed. note: I've changed the link, as Charlie's original essay is now in a fee-based archive ... what you get in the above link is another copy, which as far as I can tell is the same.]
I come at this as a participant in the portable MP3 culture, but not an iPod owner. My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500, in 1999, only a year after the first portable MP3 player had been introduced. I can still remember the resistance Robin put up to my desire to own one ... she didn't know what MP3s were, and certainly didn't think they were the Next Big Thing. (The Rio 500 had a whopping 64MB of memory.) Later I got a Rio Karma (about which more in a second), and now I have my first flash MP3 player, a Sansa e260.
I go into detail here for a couple of reasons. First, you note that "iPod" is "close to" being a word like Xerox or Kleenex ... I'd say this happened some time ago. When I had my Rio 500, it was so unusual that people didn't bother to ask me what it was, if that makes sense. When I got my Rio Karma (and now with my Sansa e260), people do ask, but if they don't know what it is, the simplest and most understandable explanation is "it's like an iPod," while those in the know just ask "why don't you get an iPod?" As you note, iPods matter even to those who don't own one ... if I say to such a person "I have an MP3 player," they may blink with incomprehension, but if I just lie and say "I have an iPod," they know right away what I'm talking about.
Second, it's long been my contention that the digital audio player world offers an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole version of the computer world. In computing, Microsoft (and Windows) are the giant elephant in the room. "Everybody" runs Windows, even though many believe Mac OS are better. The ubiquity of Windows in the marketplace means Mac users often have to scramble to get software etc ... while Mac users are tenacious and the Mac community does a great job of getting stuff out to the users, I nonetheless hear about once a week "I can't use it, it won't run on a Mac," while I rarely hear the same about Windows.
Well, in the digital player world, Apple is Microsoft, and everyone else is Apple. The iPod and its Apple variants are ubiquitous ... "everybody" has one. Downloads from the iTunes store often won’t work on anything but an iPod or iTunes. Nonetheless, many believe other players are better. A good example is the aforementioned Rio Karma. It was the ultimate player for geeks ... it did a gazillion more things than the iPod, and did them better. (Examples would include the variety of files it would play besides MP3s, including arcane stuff like Ogg Vorbis, and the complexity of the built-in equalizer, which not only had five adjustable bands but also the ability to set zero on each band to whatever you wanted ... I don't even know if I'm saying this right, I just copied someone else's setting, but you get the point.) Let me put it this way: there is a webpage titled "1000 Things About the Rio Karma" which is "A collection of geeky details about the hardware, software, operation, and design of the Rio Karma."
The Karma wasn't perfect, or I'd still have mine. The hard drives were cranky, meaning I went through two myself, and the market is so dominated by Apple that Rio probably didn't stand a chance (they no longer exist, which is why when my Karma died a second time, I had nowhere to go). The point, though, is that the Rio Karma was to iPods as Macs are to Windows machines: better but less popular. (The Karma was even butt-ugly, which kinda helped its geek factor.)
This is getting long, I shoulda made it a post on my own blog [ed. note: I did!]. I think your basic argument in the piece is right on target, and your connection of the iPod's release and continued success in the post-9/11 world makes a lot of sense. If I wasn't on meds, though, I'd strongly disagree with the notion that DAP users are monstrous. First, just in the context of Annalee's remarks, iPods are no different than prior portable players ... they are technological devices to allow public listening in private (or is that private listening in public?). Your discussion of how important it is that iPods hold so much material compared to Walkmen (so that we can bring home along with us) is crucial, but that iPods are technological doesn't really separate them from earlier devices. So if iPods make us into monsters, so did Walkmen.
But there's more. Annalee is as technologically savvy as anyone I know, so I'm not really talking about her when I say that there is some unfortunate demonizing going on here. You are right to focus on the way portable players serve to cut us off from others ... that is an important difference between now and back in the day. Having said that, and acknowledging that the earbuds isolate us, I'd just add that long before Sony and Apple, there were people who went out in public and read books. If you spoke to them, they could hear you, to be sure. But oftentimes the last thing they wanted was to communicate with others. The community/isolation trick you talk about (going out in public, then shutting out the world) is easier and more efficient in the iPod era, but I think there's a fear of technology underscoring the idea that people with white earphones are somehow more anti-social than the book readers of an earlier cafe culture.
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