A technophobe’s journey to the truth: You can’t fight the iPod, you can only hope to contain it

If enough people are all doing the same thing by themselves at the same time, does that make it a group activity? To rephrase, if we were all to walk around with our fingers in our ears, staring at each other, would that make it a form of communication?

I ask, because we’re already there, and perhaps it’s time we took a look around and asked ourselves — and maybe even each other — what kind of world, or cells, we’re building?

If you’re wondering where all of this is coming from, let me explain: I got an iPod for Christmas. As one buddy said to me, “Congratulations! You’ve finally made it to the year 2001.”

I fought against the urge to join the iPod revolution for as long as I could. I have a number of philosophical objections to it, the first of which is the fact that it’s yet another step in our culture’s herky-jerky dance away from actually consuming music as art.

Once upon a time, the long-playing record was the dominant form of music in this country. It was designed to be appreciated at home, where you can actually sit and concentrate on the music. It came with big, beautiful artwork that could enhance the listening experience when viewed in conjunction with the superior sound quality of vinyl. This was music appreciation.

We’ll skip right over the 8-track and say that then came the cassette tape. It sounded like crap, the cover art was about one-tenth the size of the record’s. But, and here’s the key, it was portable. You could put the cassette in a device called a Walkman and take it with you everywhere you went.

Not only that, but to paraphrase Alfred Molina’s crackhead character in “Boogie Nights,” you could create mix tapes that allowed you to sidestep the artists’ original intentions for the contexts in which their music was to be experienced.

The cassette, of course, was followed by the CD, a format with bigger art and better sound, although still not to the level of vinyl. The Discman was never as portable as the Walkman — it was not only unwieldy, but it skipped like a little girl under the spell of her first crush — and hence it seemed to put some of the emphasis back onto the music.

If we were to create a diagram of the musical foodchain, the iPod, or the digital music file it plays, would be at the very end, devouring all that came before it. It even recontextualizes music for a new generation of listeners, which in turn shapes what CDs, vinyl and MP3s are then produced, making this metaphor really sing.

Viewed as part of the evolution of our species’ relationship with music, it represents both steps forward and backward. The sound is about as crisp as a CD’s, and it’s far more portable than even the smallest Walkman. It’s easy to download any music you want onto your iPod, after paying for it, of course. For the record, I’m still buying CDs, ripping them onto my computer, then downloading them onto my iPod.

Again, as with the mix tape, this furthers our culture’s already short attention span and our egotistical belief that we know better how the music should be heard than the artists who created it.

If the artist you’re listening to is Britney Spears, that’s true. If it’s Nick Cave or Tom Waits, it’s so not.

The iPod shouldn’t be seen as a separate entity, but as a part of a digital revolution that includes laptops and other streamlined home computers, cell phones, Bluetooth headsets and, most recently, the iPhone. Whereas the Walkman was one diversion in your daily life, we’ve now created a different device for every moment of your day.

I believe it would be easy never to directly interact with another human being for the rest of your life, if that was what you wanted. And some people’s behavior has me convinced that’s exactly what they want. You know who you are, public Bluetooth talkers. May your deaths be slow and soundtracked by meaningless, self-important babble.

As I’ve experimented with my iPod in the past weeks, learning to customize my playlists and once again getting used to the idea that I can take my music with me without a suitcase, I’ve noticed that it makes the rest of the world fade into the background. I can tune out the political discussions of my coworkers, the street sounds as I walk to the coffee shop, and the sounds outside my room as I fall asleep.

The iPod is a cocoon that allows you to so completely control your environment that you can ignore everybody else on the planet. It’s one more bar in the gilded cages we’re building for ourselves in the evenings, when we need something to do with our hands while we watch E!

Every time I listen to some cretin critiquing a movie at street volume in the middle of a theater, every time I hear that Mike Huckabee has won a primary, every time I read about another independent business closing its doors as another stripmall opens its own, I want to crank up the volume on my iPod.

As those of us who still have enough sensitivity and perspective to see what is wrong with the world find better ways of blocking it out, I suspect our apathy and inaction will result in the world becoming ever more in need of blocking out.

Or maybe I just need to take my earbuds out and have a conversation with the person standing next to me in line at Fred Meyer. Most people, when you stop and talk to them, aren’t nearly as bad as they seem while listening to a mix made entirely out of horror movie soundtracks.

Jake TenPas can be reached at jake.tenpas@lee.net or 758-9514.