Institute For The Future

From iPod to ourpod

A couple weeks ago, I scored a piece in the San Jose Mercury News about my romance with the iPod. A copy is attached here.

 

"From iPod to ourpod: Will it become a more social machine?" San Jose Mercury News, 10 October 2005.

IF THE DIGITAL MUSIC PLAYER, WITH ITS UBIQUITOUS EARBUDS, SEEMS LIKE A DEVICE THAT ISOLATES, JUST WAIT. IT MAY WELL BRING US CLOSER TOGETHER

By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

About a week before my last birthday, my 6-year-old daughter started thinking about what kind of cake I should have. In her world, birthday parties have themes, and birthday cakes are serious business: She once talked my wife into making a dome-shape cake, decorating it like a ball gown, and putting a Barbie in the middle. (The effect was a bit like Evita Perón at the prom.) After a few days, she figured it out. "You should have an iPod cake," she announced.

I should have known. This is a girl whose drawings of me always show me plugged into my iPod. She leaves off the cell phone and the portable flash drive I wear around my neck -- both of which I also carry all the time. Like all good artists, she abstracts to catch a deeper truth: Other technologies are conveniences, but with my entire personal musical history -- 22 gigabytes of music organized into 100 playlists -- my iPod is no longer just a product. It's an extension of myself. It's myPod.

Apple Computer's iPod digital music player is an amazing success. More than 20 million have been sold since their introduction in 2001 -- more than 6 million in a recent three-month period alone. And the iPod sensation crosses generational boundaries: Teens and young adults won't be seen without the earbuds and dangling wires, but their parents are almost as likely to be hooked.

More than cachet

The iPod revolution is partly about its elegant technology. (The sleek Nano model weighs in at just 1.5 ounces and is a mere 0.27 inches deep -- "thinner than a No. 2 pencil," CEO Steve Jobs boasts.) Its unaccountably tragic, flimsy earbud covers aside, the iPod is brilliantly designed and easy to use. But there's more at play here than cachet. The iPod is a soaring success because it gives people what they want -- their music, the music that helps define them, whenever they want it. For many of us, listening to music is an intensely personal experience, and the iPod plays -- so to speak -- on that.

The question that may determine the iPod's lasting success, though, is whether it will make an evolutionary leap from something that is intensely personal to something that can also bring people closer together. MyPod, meet ourPod.

For the moment, though, the iPod is me-centric and above all, a music player.

In some ways, society was primed for it. Among all media, music is unique in its mix of ubiquity and intimacy; many of us have lived our whole lives in a world in which music has been plentiful and ever-present. The invention of the transistor radio in the late 1950s let radio jump off vacuum tubes and out of living rooms, and into cheap devices we could carry around with us; in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Walkman and portable CD player let us carry fractions of our own music with us. All of these devices let music play in the background when we're doing other things. We've come to count on its presence.

At the same time, music is very intimate -- and we can have an emotional attachment that keeps us wanting to plug in. Some songs will always remind you of your first kiss, your best friend's wedding, the road trip you took across the country after graduating from college.

Music can also be a tool for defining and reinventing ourselves. As teens we use music to wall off our parents. In college, many of us discover new music that puts some distance between adolescence and adulthood, and perhaps gives us new ideas about politics, the world or ourselves.

The beauty of the iPod is that it makes it easy for adults to instantly return to those personal worlds. Thanks to the iTunes store, I've reconnected with songs I haven't heard in eons, proof to me that the power of the iPod to evoke passionate responses is mainly a reflection of our relationships with our music.

Great, you might say: You're in touch with your music. You can play whatever you want, anywhere you want, any time you want. What a perfect marriage -- a very personal technology wedded to a form of entertainment that is just as intimate, and just as powerful.

But aren't you, more than ever, cut off from the rest of us?

Sometimes. I definitely use myPod to close off the world when I'm working. Others isolate themselves when they're commuting on a subway or bus. But this anxiety is centuries old; making media experiences private often seems to raise concerns about the consequences of isolation.

Usually the fears seem misplaced in retrospect. In the Middle Ages, reading had been a public, group experience; the rise of literacy rates and diffusion of cheap books sparked worries that people would start reading and thinking for themselves -- and deviate from religious teachings. Society survived, and people have found a way of reconnecting over books: book clubs.

More recently, in the 1950s, people lamented that the transistor radio would spell the end of families gathered around the radio; it did, but it didn't stop families from listening to music and talking together. Parents were no longer able to prevent their children from secretly listening to rock 'n' roll, or doo-wop, or even jazz, but that hasn't pulled families apart, either.

Some technologies even move from one extreme to the other. Parents who used to worry that the personal computer would isolate their kids now fret about them spending too much time instant messaging.

Getting social

Interestingly, my daughter's pictures rarely show me sitting alone with my iPod: Often, I'm doing things with my family. Apparently she doesn't see the headphones as a barrier. Maybe she's prescient, for you can easily imagine designing ways for the iPod to be more sociable.

In fact, the iTunes software that supports the iPod already has some interesting social features. If you're in an office with people who also have iTunes, you can see their music libraries over a network and listen to their songs -- so long as they weren't bought from the iTunes store. Seeing a colleague's music collection is a great way to find out things about them that you might never guess; were Leonardo da Vinci alive today, he'd say that playlists are a window to the soul. (Worried that your collection isn't cool enough? Don't. You can opt out.)

Some designers have brainstormed how to bring sharing to the iPod itself, and turn the experience of listening to your music from a personal and isolating one into one that enriches our social environment. There's already a phenomenon called iPodjacking, where iPod users trade headphones for a moment, and check out each other's music. Clay Shirky, a New York University professor and social software guru, imagines a service that would read the contents of all the MP3 players in a bar, and construct a group playlist that appeals to all the patrons.

Or imagine a wireless network (recognizing Apple's occasionally overboard penchant for using proprietary rather than standard technology -- let's call it LivePod) that lets iPod users listen along with their neighbors -- and lets the person whose music is being accessed know who is joining in. Add in the ability to save snippets of a song and information about the artist and CD it's from, and you've got the makings of a nice viral marketing service.

So perhaps the deep personal experience that the iPod allows will one day become a social one, too. This would be big. In his book "Natural-Born Cyborgs," computer scientist and philosopher Andy Clark argues that humans' neural flexibility allows them to develop deep, symbiotic relationships with technologies, using them to extend our mental capabilities. These have always been personal technologies, like writing tools and eyeglasses. What happens to our minds and selves when we use technologies to simultaneously rewire our brains and link with others is anyone's guess.

Of course, we've only begun to realize how we might adapt to the iPod, as it moves from a device whose solitary consumption can be isolating to one that can bring people together. Young people have already changed their behavior; for them, walking and talking side by side, and listening to music, isn't rude; it's a new way of socializing.

Perhaps Apple's announcement this week will move the iPod even more toward being a social tool. In any case, as the evolution continues, we can only hope that the union of technology and human need will deliver us shared moments just like the iPod cake that my daughter got my wife to bake.

Which, by the way, was delicious.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang ([email protected]) is a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto think tank. His iPod has 4,300 songs and counting. His blog is at www.askpang.typepad.com. He wrote this article for Perspective.

 

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