As reported in the Village Voice, and posted on a number of blogs, sometime last week an "activist" defaced a block-long row of iPod posters in downtown Manhattan, using a permanent marker to emblazon each with such slogans as "the 'i' stands for isolation" and "the 'i' stands for impolite."
So... forget the disaster that is Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan), the faltering economy, the increasingly bleak prospects of the American working class, the state of the environment, and about 10,000 other things actually worth getting upset about - what gets this individual's blood boiling is... iPods! And, sadly, he, or she, is not alone. I can't count, over the past year or two, the number of conversations I've overheard, or message board postings I've read, that have involved some sort of quasi-intellectual trashing of iPods; none of them, I should add, even remotely intriguing. Take the words "solipsistic," "paradigm," "narcissism," "worldview," and "yuppie," and a handful of appropriate pronouns and conjunctions; spend ten minutes playing magnetic poetry with them, and you'll have reconstructed probably ninety percent of the anti-iPod screeds I've observed.
Now, I should probably mention that I do not own an iPod; nor do I ever anticipate owning one. So, this isn't personal. Rather, it's about wondering why the heck people get worked up about such petty nonsense, given there are so many other things worth getting angry about. The Walkman was invented in 1979, which means people have been walking around listening to music on headphones for a quarter of a century. But, why this has just now become an issue, with the introduction of the iPod, is beyond me. Yes, wearing headphones is isolating, but no more so than, say, reading a book, or daydreaming, or any of the many other things people do in public that distracts them from their surroundings. And listening to headphones is only impolite, in the context of interaction with the larger world, if they're used as an excuse to ignore others - which has nothing to do with the inherent properties of the headphones themselves. One could just as easily ignore others by humming or staring into space.
Really, I can't explain iPod-bashing. I suspect it's a manner of rationalizing not buying one: most of the iPod bashers I've talked with will readily admit that iPods are pretty damn nifty, but that they can't - because they can't afford it, or, more often, because they eschew anything "trendy" - buy one themselves. Either that or it's just good old fashioned class warfare - attacking what amounts to conspicuous consumption amongst urban hipsters. At any rate, it's not worth the time, or energy. You may as well make a point of complaining about toasters, or alarm clocks. The iPod is just a thing, that people buy. Nothing else.
The powers that be do enough to divide the populace without us doing their work for them. There's no use in fighting amongst ourselves over a hunk of white plastic and circuits while the U.S. turns, slowly but surely, into a nation modeled, economically and socially, on a third world theocracy. If the "i" is going to stand for anything, let it be "I don't care that you have an iPod. I have more important things to worry about."
