Generation iPod
The Times
July 9, 2005
The iPod generation may be paying too high a price for the lonely pleasures of technology. Ed Smith wonders if we shouldn’t join our mates down the pub
IF LEISURE TIME IS ALWAYS getting better, why the nostalgia? It is the age of iPod, and yet we romanticise vinyl. We subscribe to Sky+, and yet a pop song points out that there are 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On). We crave choice, only to be baffled by it. Might all these sophisticated leisure options, devices designed to avoid loneliness and introspection, take us further away from both friendship and the imagination? Maybe the primitive recent past has a warmer social and intellectual glow.
Two new books are concerned with modernity and social change, the way we pursue life and the stuff that surrounds us, the “I” generation. iPod, Therefore I Am is part history of Apple computers, part autobiography of Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ and an iPod junkie. Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita, is a dazzling array of provocative social theories pinned around the idea that the media now permeates every strand of our experience.
We are mediated to the nth degree. iPod, Therefore I Am might have been well served by a closer look at the ideas beneath the surface, whereas the ideas of Mediated come so thick and fast that sometimes the good ones get lost along the way.
Thomas de Zengotita believes that the media influences so many human experiences that it is hard to be certain whether something is real (as in directly lived) or transmuted through the distorting lens of the mass media. In this postmodern mediated world, our emotions have been so manipulated from such an early age that we cannot imagine it any other way.
For example, was grief for the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, real or constructed? Is so much now known about public figures that it is inevitable that all heroes will be shown to have feet of clay? Why does our generation indulge a cult of childhood innocence? Why is politics regarded as a charade, and yet sporting excellence increasingly revered as true heroism? De Zengotita answers his questions with a chatty, restless and energetic brilliance that suggests that he can’t stop writing in case he loses the train of thought.
Mediated is a polymath’s ingenious take on modern life, a cultural examination of the state we’re in. Intellectually, there is a slight circularity to the central argument: if the media is interpreted so broadly, it is little wonder that everything can be traced back to the media’s influence. Post-modern social theory also has an innate linguistic slipperiness, a problem exacerbated by de Zengotita’s fondness for ironies within ironies. This is not an easy book. Sometimes I felt that I was reading a clever idea without being sure what that idea actually meant. But that does not detract from its sparkling intellectual firepower. Mediated is as impressive as it is provocative.
Where Thomas de Zengotita’s book is about everything, the world in one volume, Dylan Jones focuses on one man and one gadget. iPod, Therefore I Am is an engaging, witty personal journey — using the contents of an iPod to tell the story of contemporary music, fashion and computing. Jones is a sharp observer of the social scene and an original music critic — particularly when he writes about his heroes Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen. There are also cameo appearances from Paul Smith and Yoko Ono, though Jones himself is often at the heart of the action.
But Jones does switch off the self-analysis when he tells the story of Apple and iPod. That strand of the book — how Steve Jobs founded Apple in his parents’ garage and how selling six million iPods made Apple über-cool again — reads more like a long New Yorker essay than a pop culture autobiography. Jones paints a good picture of the Californian ivory tower where Apple’s wizards dream up the technology that defines our leisure lives.
Despite its charm, iPod, Therefore I Am might have examined more deeply what the obsession with carrying around our own musical tastes reveals about this generation. The iPod is only one extremely successful example of the more general privatisation of leisure time. How much pleasanter private space is today than 50 years ago: DVDs, iPods, home cinema, surround sound, broadband internet, instant downloads, 3G phones.
Where we once wound down after a hard day over a matey drink, in a kind of social third gear, we are now more likely to plug in the iPod and go to the gym. Being alone, in short, has never been less lonely.
Private time has been the winner, social life the loser. It is a question of options. Company, perhaps company we might not have wanted given a broader range of choices, was once the only available alternative to reading a book or sitting alone at home. For better or worse, it was the combination of conversation and alcohol — the working men’s club, the gentleman’s club, the public house — that shaped our society.
Generation iPod will not be so defined by drink and conversation. The craic, the shared memories of staving off boredom together, the narrative, the listening pack, the rotating narrators — it does not work with headphones on. It will become increasingly difficult, in fact, to drag people out of their homes at all. Swinging London and bohemian Greenwich Village are the past, the stuff of legend. Los Angeles-style gated suburbia is the future.
A further irony may await Generation iPod. Conversation might broaden the mind, Gibbon argued, but solitude is the school of genius. But even solitude isn’t what it used to be. Solitude is nicer, number, milder for Generation iPod. We can bumble along in a kind of emotional neutral. But it is real solitude — silent lonely solitude, the introspective sharp edge of our innermost thoughts — that prompts the creative and artistic urge. That is not meant to glamorise unhappiness. But it is what Gibbon meant by the school of genius — the hard and lonely training ground out of which come the greatest poems, paintings and symphonies.
Comfort, on the other hand, has the discomforting habit of leaving no trace or legacy. Maybe there is a danger that we will end up so busy filling our iPods with songs that we won’t get around to writing great ones of our own.