Great article on the life and death of the Apple iPod in the SMH. Some really interesting comments on the iPod as the “first cultural icon of the 21st century”. Here’s a snippet:
Apple has changed the way we think about technology and design, the way we shop, the way we consume media and the way we interact with each other. Via the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad it has opened up doors for other methods of technology to come into our lives. None of that would have happened without the iPod. “It was the first cultural icon of the 21st century,” says Dr Michael Bull, a lecturer in media and film at the University Of Sussex, south-east England, where his studies on the sociology around the MP3 player have earned him the sobriquet “Professor iPod”. “It was the first MP3 player that really worked. With the earlier ones you had to get down on your knees and pray to get a bit of music out of them. And it became symbolic of the way people like to move around in cities. It fitted the desire for a technological freedom, whereby you moved to your own soundscape. Roland Barthes argued that, in medieval society, cathedrals were the iconic form. Then by the 1950s it had become the car – the Citroen DS. I argue that 50 years later it was the iPod, this technology that let you fit your whole world in your pocket. It was representative of a key moment in the social world of the 21st century.”
Read the rest here. Some of the content reminded me of some of Stu Crawshaw’s thoughts from his Youth Ministry as Shock Absorber article.
Do you have an iPod? Do you still use it? Can you name a competitor for other 21st Century icons?
