Reading The Independent this week is a hoot. It is a self-parody of liberal orthodoxy. The best so far: To mark the start of Lent, The Independent made some suggestions about what to give up, like driving, bottled water, shopping at supermarkets and using plastic shopping bags there. Oh, and you now have to toss your iPod:
IPods are everywhere. We listen to them on trains, in the gym, and at home. But while we have been giving the world our very own soundtrack, we have forgotten that the world plays a mean tune itself.“IPods are another distraction,” says Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler magazine. “They blot out our misery, but the misery is still there. If you are bored on the tube, bus or commuter train, I would recommend carrying around a copy of Blake’s collected poetry.”
“When you’re listening to an iPod,” says the philosopher AC Grayling, “what you’re trying to do is shut out the outside world. … If you take your earphones out you can hear that there is wind in the trees and birds in those trees still.”
My position has been that iPods are not evil, but they are a nuisance. I like technology that fits in with my daily life and routine, or makes both easier. To change my habits, by downloading songs, listening through a tiny box with questionable sound quality, doesn’t seem like humans being served by technology—but humans bending to it. Hence, I like online shopping—it fits in with my surfing, and surfing fits in with my quest for information—but these iPods are ‘another distraction’ as the Idler editor says. If I want music, I’ll hum a tune. The only disturbing thing is that I have become part of the self-parody …
I don’t like Ipods b/c of the way they look (sorry! I refuse to let my aesthetic sense cave in to the crowd!), and I agree that life can be cooler when your ears are open to interacting with the real life people you run into. But I listen to mp3s on my pda and discman, and of course, podcasting is a tool like anything else, to be used like anything else.
Prolific and unnecessary drinking of bottled water, on the other hand, is objectively bad, and your conflation of the two opinions seems in the same school of fuzzy thinking that makes the Independent sound like parody.
Saheli, I must agree with you over the iPod’s appearance. Ubiquitous and dull.