Mobile worlds

A world frenziedly mapping milestones as December 31 approaches strangely fa-iled to appreciate a twentieth birthday last month. Strange because, for better or for worse, the Walkman not only accorded us the freedom to carry along our musical scores as we went about our lives, it also revolutionised the concept of private space. If smooth and irreversible integration into daily life is the touchstone of a technological innovation, Sony’s product did much more: it ch-arted the path to man’s transformation into a mobile universe. Instant moods, so far the preserve of fairytales and magical witches’ potions, became just a click of the play button away if you lugged the right tape in your rucksack. It is instructive to note that the first Walkman, that metallic coloured and romantically named Soundabout, had a facility for two listeners with a hotline for them to converse amidst the musical din a facility that was soon done away with. Its inventors may not have intended so, but the Walkman soon became theharbinger of an increasingly selfish, insular me generation; this shield from the world was not to be shared.

Amidst the late nineties’ bounteous variety, it is difficult to recall the bafflement that July day in 1979 when Sony unveiled a small tape recorder with a headphone. Certainly, it is easier to imagine the health scares it spawned. If mobile phones give us sleepless nights with so far unsubstantiated fears about baked brains and evaporating memories, the hearing losses and psychological ills which would surely be wrought by this new icon of the me generation were part of passionate debate for much of the early eighties. The lessons therein are evident, but there is a charming, though apocryphal, tale about Sony’s legendary chief Akio Morita doing the rounds of his empire and chancing upon a small tape recorder targeted at journalists called the Pr-essman. A way off in the distance he spied a pair of headphones. The rest is history.

But if the Walkman offered an increasingly individualisticpopulace a shield against their world, a buffer against the cacophony of lives moving ever faster as against the dulling sameness of post-industrial society, critics argue that it also dented our capacity to appreciate music. They whine that a whole generation has grown up without the patience to appreciate the delicate nuances of a public concert, without the courtesy to make a distinction between fastforwarding music on call on their little gadgets and paying polite attention to a live performance. From here, moans about the loss of community spirit and nostalgic evocations of the story-and-song sessions around the bonfire what with a full-fledged multimedia revolution on our hands are but a logical step away. But if these misgivings fall on deaf years, that’s only because, headphones on, everybody else is humming along with the latest tracks.