Michael Bywater puts it like this,
Wandering from room to room is someone with an iPod; music no longer requires going out, being with other people, or even sitting in a room on your own, listening. Now it is a permanent distraction, a matter of right, a way of affirming your identity without having to be identified by other members of your chosen tribe; even when we interact with the outside world, reluctantly, our ears are plugged with the iPod buds, trickling music into our minds. Our grandparents would have thought it an appalling rudeness; after all, what does it say but, 'I do not acknowledge your existence. You are superfluous to me. I may be moving in the same physical space as you, but don't expect me to acknowledge it.'
Nuff said.
2 comments:
For a more sociological (and rigorous) understanding of the mp3 player and how people use it to construct their own spaces etc, you might want to check out Michael Bull (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/mediastudies/profile119032.html)
How different is listening to music on an iPod on a train from, say, being deeply engrossed in a book or newspaper? Can't the same be said? People rarely employ new technologies to 'do' any new behaviour, rather they tend to employ them in simialr ways. Thus, 'I do not acknowledge your existence. You are superfluous to me. I may be moving in the same physical space as you, but don't expect me to acknowledge it' can be said of the book reader on a bus. We often knock new things because we dont' understand them - they're 'foreign' to us. But dig deeper, and they aren't at all; they are new ways of doing existing things. Thus, to ask what our grandparents might have said (I wonder how much of Michael Bywater's book is based on any rigorous empirical evidence rather than anecdotal evidence) is to suggest that their behaviour was in any way deeply different from ours (and they in fact know 'better', which they rarely do).It isn't.
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