iPods Make The World Go Away

I know this to be true! Never has technolgy produced a more life changing gadget than the iPod. (Leave it to Apple to think differently)

iPods Make the World Go Away
As technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, we seek out other less obtrusive gadgets to protect us from all the noise.
FORTUNE
Thursday, March 24, 2005
By David Kirkpatrick


We're living in a device-centric age. Technology may not yet fully define us, but it increasingly defines how we behave and spend our time. In New York City, I notice that subway riders are quieter than they once were. More and more, I see little white earphone wires emerging from their hats and hair--the telltale sign that they're listening to iPods. Sometimes I'd estimate that as many as 25% of all the commuters either in the cars or on the platforms are listening to music, an audio book, or a Podcast. And in the Tokyo subway, I'm told, silence descends when the doors close. Almost all the commuters in that city pull out cellphones or other electronic devices and peck at their miniature keyboards, sending messages or playing games.

While I've had my share of techno devices and toys (including an original iPod), it wasn't until someone gave me an iPod shuffle last week that I fully joined the new digitized masses. It's giving me new insight into how technology is changing our daily lives. What's different about the shuffle is that it's amazingly small and light. The player, which Apple describes as "about the size of a pack of gum," hangs from a little cord around your neck. Everywhere I go people stop me to ask what it is. And once I tell them that it's a music player, they marvel at its diminutive size.

With the iPod shuffle, it's infinitely easier for me to live in a world of music. In the first five days that I've owned it, I've listened to about three times as much total music as I would have otherwise. I find that I take it off only when my eardrums start to ring. But most of the time, I barely realize that I'm using the shuffle.

This is something the music industry seems not to have fully appreciated: We can now simply listen to more music. That's why downloading music has got to be an unalloyed good for the industry. The music companies probably have to figure out different pricing models, but there's no question in my mind that the industry's opportunities are growing, not diminishing, as people have easier access to music and listen to it more often.

But this raises another question for me: Why do I, and so many others, want to cocoon ourselves off into our little music bubbles, even when we're out and about? I think one reason has to do our exasperation with the other technologies around us: cellphones, PCs, BlackBerries, laptops, etc. With all these devices, we're wired and ready to receive telephone calls, e-mails, IMs, and instant everything all the time.

For me, e-mail is particularly annoying. Every day, I'm finding it more and more debilitating. There's just too much coming in, and it takes me way too much time to manage it all. I have three e-mail accounts, and despite spending hours a day trying to deal with all the messages, I never come close to catching up. E-mail is becoming a curse, not a blessing. It raises my blood pressure. I'm getting shell-shocked by technology. But now a new technology offers me an antidote: the iPod shuffle. And so my music-enveloped cocoon grows tighter. Music soothes the frazzled beast. My blood pressure drops.

Some people prefer to retreat from the world with games rather than with music. With today's launch of the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), that will become much easier for gamers. (Read my colleague Peter Lewis's insightful review of the new PlayStation, "It's Fun and Games Again at Sony.") It's too early to say what problems the new game player will create and which ones it will solve. But while the PSP is expected to be a huge success, I doubt if it will have the same cultural impact of the newest iPod. Even though it's portable, the PSP is still too big to unobtrusively slip into our lives like the tiny iPod shuffle can. When I'm walking down the street (or riding on the subway), the shuffle just becomes part of my world.