Writers for college newspapers are starting to speak out about the socially isolating effects of the Apple iPod portable music player. A Pitt News commentary by U Pittsburgh student Michael Darling also ran yesterday in in Tech News World. Darling uses Duke's fall giveaway of iPods to students as a take-off point.

The willingness of college administrators to embrace this kind of technology so enthusiastically reflects a disturbing trend toward isolation: one in which students are increasingly choosing to block out the things they don't want to see and hear.

....Just the other evening, I was riding the 61C to Oakland when two men in front of me began bickering with each other about politics. Their conversation quickly shifted to whether John F. Kennedy would have been a one or two-term president had he not been assassinated and how crucial qualities like charisma, charm and good looks still are to contemporary politics.

I leaned forward in my seat to eavesdrop in as the girl in front of them, who had also been listening intently, whirled around and injected herself into the conversation. The men were at first slightly taken aback, but within minutes they had incorporated both of us into the discussion.

I looked around the bus at the tired faces nodding along to whichever beat they had chosen for the brief ride and felt thankful for a change that I had left my Discman at home. The batteries had run out the night before, and I was suddenly in no hurry to have them replaced.

At mndaily.com, University of Minnesota student and movie reviewer Steven Synder writes:

It’s a sad, but true, fact that in this iPod-wearing, instant-messaging, cell-phone-screaming country of isolation, we have lost almost all connection to those around us. It is now easier than ever to walk down the street or even ride the bus and be completely removed from those sitting inches away.

The iPod is hardly the first personal technology gadget to be used for enforcing isloation (think Sony Walkman, cell phone) but the cult of the iPod fetish (77 Google entries under the term currently) foretells growing social atomization, and even greater elevation of form over content.

By the way, I like Apple computers, and use my iMac G5 for sharing customized music playlists in real time with numbers of people, whose ears are open to each other and the music, simultaneously.

THERE'S a killer app.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at June 1, 2005 01:43 PM