*Kazys Varnelis:
http://varnelis.net/blog/on_30_years_of_soundtracks_to_life
"On July 1, the Sony Walkman will be 30 years old. It's hard to imagine what urban life was before the Walkman. Sony first introduced portable transistor radios in 1957 and these proliferated rapidly. With an earphone (like this), it was possible to carry music around on the go, but both sources and quality were limited. (...)
"Portable cassette players and boomboxes flourished in the 1970s and if the latter served as means of building impromptu communities, they were also consciously thought of as sonic assault devices, marking out territory and creating tension in urban spaces. The Walkman was a counter against this, turning music inward toward a solitary experience (although not entirely: as Scott points out, Walkmen often had two jacks, making them less solitary than iPods). If the boombox represents the last moment of urban decay and street violence, the Walkman represents its re-colonization. This would be recapitulated in 2001 when the iPod turned out to be the first major consumer product introduced after 9/11."
((((Okay, there are electronics guys in the audience going "whaaah?" right now, but I'm a novelist and I kinda dig the theoretico-socio-technical... like the allegation that iPods have got something coherent to do with 9/11. "Gothic High-Tech," okay? Maybe Al Qaeda cyberwar guys *designed* the iPod in order to collapse American rock and roll as an imperial hegemonic soft-power strategy.)))
"What strikes me about the history of the Walkman is how different technology is now: iPods are 8 years old and already by the time of their introduction, CD players, flash-based MP3, and minidisc players had supplanted Walkmen. Technologies, such as the Walkman, that once seemed ubiquitous now have a run of less than a decade before disappearing or transforming utterly. And yet, historians and theorists use operative models largely developed within the days of the Walkman or—thinking of the continued popularity of the Situationists or Deleuze—in the days of the transistor radio." (((Yup!)))
