Gibson and Walkman
Nov. 14th, 2007 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
infrogmationInteresting short interview with S.F. writer William Gibson from Rolling Stone
One point I find interesting is his observation on the Sony Walkman:
"The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn't move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!"
I am just old enough to remember the Walkman phenomena and the technological state before it, and had a very different impression.
I had a Walkman (or one of its early clones) and enjoyed using it, but at the time regarded it as a minor improvement of existing technology with a large dose of marketing hype.
Walkman article on Wikipedia
When I was a little kid in the 1960s, there were already "Transistor" radios about the size of a pack of cigarettes that one could listen to with an earphone jack. (I take it that the technology was fairly new at the time, and I recall slang use of the term "transistorized" to mean something made improbably small.)
By the early 1970s, there were cassette tape recorders just slightly larger than a hard-cover book that one could easily carry with one hand, and listen to either with the built-in speaker or through an earphone. (I saw cheap cassette player/recorders at Radio Shack within the last year that look little changed from those of more than 30 years ago.)
The Walkman-- okay, they made it smaller, in part by elimiating the built in speaker. And instead of an ear-plug, a pair of tiny cheap-ass headphones. OK, but I rolled my eyes at the advertising that proclaimed it somehow revolutionary.
Perhaps the stereo rather than mono is what particularly impressed some people? I consider stereophonic sound reproduction nifty, but when the audio isn't particularly high-fidelity to begin with, a minor point.
One point I find interesting is his observation on the Sony Walkman:
"The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn't move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!"
I am just old enough to remember the Walkman phenomena and the technological state before it, and had a very different impression.
I had a Walkman (or one of its early clones) and enjoyed using it, but at the time regarded it as a minor improvement of existing technology with a large dose of marketing hype.
Walkman article on Wikipedia
When I was a little kid in the 1960s, there were already "Transistor" radios about the size of a pack of cigarettes that one could listen to with an earphone jack. (I take it that the technology was fairly new at the time, and I recall slang use of the term "transistorized" to mean something made improbably small.)
By the early 1970s, there were cassette tape recorders just slightly larger than a hard-cover book that one could easily carry with one hand, and listen to either with the built-in speaker or through an earphone. (I saw cheap cassette player/recorders at Radio Shack within the last year that look little changed from those of more than 30 years ago.)
The Walkman-- okay, they made it smaller, in part by elimiating the built in speaker. And instead of an ear-plug, a pair of tiny cheap-ass headphones. OK, but I rolled my eyes at the advertising that proclaimed it somehow revolutionary.
Perhaps the stereo rather than mono is what particularly impressed some people? I consider stereophonic sound reproduction nifty, but when the audio isn't particularly high-fidelity to begin with, a minor point.
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I think the revolution was in how people could EXPERIENCE music
Date: 2007-11-15 02:01 pm (UTC)The mixtape + the walkman represent the start of music fan culture as a more participatory>creative culture along with a shift in how precisely possible it was to control one's personal inner-space soundtrack. The death of the commons does coincide with the rise of the walkman. I know that I have built entire mixtapes designed to shut out particular environments and experiences.
Now we plug in to ignore one another in cramped cubicle mazes, but we don't have to store giant binders of CDs or have cabinetry custom-built for our record collections.
Revolution isn't too strong a word, but I think that this is an opportunity to stop and try to remember what happened in the 90s.
The portable CD players were notoriously unstable, but very popular, if you remember. The leap from cassette mixtapes to the iPod actually happened quickly over about a decade from 1990-2000.
Oddly, I keep coming across otherwise hip baby boomers -- some of them have iPhones, even -- who just do not get iTunes/iPod. It's too magic for them. It's sweet. Their eyes get wide when they hear that the sound out the earbuds is actually fine enough for listening. We who are able should help those people. In fact, as my good deed of the morning, I'm going to check in with my runner boss with the new MacBook Pro and make sure that she knows what a shuffle could add to her life.
There is a sound commons in New Orleans. That's one of the amazing things about us and our best argument for our status as an intergalactic spaceport.
Also, remember how rural electrification utterly transformed the culture of the American South during the radio age and the tee vee age. All this stuff and car radios especially have helped shape the very stuff we acquire iPods to listen in on anyway.
Electricity.
I've been being made dissatisfied by the new iPod Touch commercials, and wondering if I needed an iPhone. I have concluded that I did. It is a sweet little object that lets me control all incoming and outgoing communications through one interface. Integrating one's practice in that regard is smart, I think. It is also smart that Apple allows the iPod touch to connect to wireless networks. Heh heh heh.
Re: I think the revolution was in how people could EXPERIENCE music
Date: 2007-11-16 02:29 pm (UTC)On reason I havn't been tempted to get an iPhone is having to use AT&T, which I remember from when it was The Phone Company -- when it became legal to escape from them I did, and don't care to be lured back.
I have an iPod, but it is mostly filled with stuff I uploaded from my cds-- along with a few things I burned from LPs and 78s.