In an NPR Talk of the Nation interview a couple of years ago Thomas De Zengotita, author of Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, was explaining (and I paraphrase) that the marriage of high-tech media and celebrity culture have made us "mediated," which is to say, we're all self-conscious and incurably vain in a way that we see our lives as protracted motion pictures with--who else?--but as us as the stars of our own feature film. This "Common Person as Marquee" mentality is reinforced by the iPod, which has seriously changed our relationship with music. Here are four of the changes that I see as I contrast iPod listening with my days in the 1970s when I would listen to Rare Earth or The Beatles or Caroline King on the turntable over and over again:
1. Because we're constantly making, and re-making, playlists, we delude ourselves with the idea that we are the musicians and the creators, while the real musicians take a back seat. In other words, we begin to believe that the music is "ours."
2. No longer do we focus on a singular album and immerse ourselves in it with the kind of obsession that allows us to really get to know its details. Instead, we listen to ten-hour playlists, which are more like wallpaper ambiance that we keep as we engage in all sorts of multi-tasking.
3. We're more vulnerable to listening to music that will be judged by others so that we often sacrifice our real musical tastes in order to have playlists that others will perceive has cool or hip. I've even heard people talk about "playlist anxieties" in which they fear their playlists may be judged as being dorky by the musical cognoscenti. To underscore this absurd state of affairs, there are actually Playlist Parties in which the attendees put their iPods in a big salad bowl and guests randomly pick up someone else's iPod and listen to their playslists. This type of music sharing then determines how attractive, or not, one is.
4. Not only have playlists become in a way our calling card, a salient feature for which we are judged, but the type of MP3 player we have determines our status. I've talked to people who won't "date down" to someone who has anything "less" than an iPod and I assume it must be a relatively current iPod at that.
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