October 23, 2001. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, summoned a small group of media-related and music industry-minded individuals to the Apple Town Hall in Cupertino California to hear about the future of how people listen to digital music. Up until this date, people knew Apple for their Macintosh computer and iBook, both of which revolutionized the way people interacted with the digital world, but after this particular announcement Apple would be known worldwide for its innovations in music. I was six years old when Jobs announced “the 21st century Walkman,” also known as the iPod. At the time I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the impact the iPod was about to have on the music world, and to go even further, society and the world at large, but I did grasp the concept that music, at the very least, played an integral role in everyone’s life to some extent. Jobs capitalized on just this concept as he rattled off all the restrictions and impracticalities of the then-current music-listening devices. With that said, Jobs introduced the iPod, a pocket-sized mp3 player with a sleek and intuitive interface as well as a 5-gigabyte mp3 storage capacity. With the introduction of the iPod into society, Apple had forever changed the way a majority of the population of the world would listen to music. Now, Kevin Kelly would assert, with the following statement being aligned with the views he expresses in his book What Technology Wants, that the progression of the mp3 player in the form of the iPod has had a greater positive impact on society rather than negative. Most people would probably agree with that statement as it’s been shown that the iPod has been used for many noble causes. For example, the iPod has been used as a quality-of-life enhancing tool, which is an extremely beneficial aspect of the iPod. Many people tend to overlook the more negative and darker attributes of the device, such as its toxicity to the environment and its effect on human social behavior, to even worse negative impacts such as its role in the heavy decline of the music industry. To me, the Apple iPod impact could be best summed up as being good, bad, and then just straight-up ugly. Thus, I would argue that the Apple iPod’s negative impacts out weigh that of its positive impacts because of the degree of severity of its adverse environmental, social, and worse yet, industry-killing effects.
Excerpt of Steve Jobs iPod Key Note Address Video
I don’t entirely disagree with the following statement by Kelly in regards to progress: “I think the balance settles out at higher than 50 percent positive, even if only slightly higher”(77). I agree that there are positive impacts associated with the progression of the mp3 player in the form of the iPod, but I don’t agree with Kelly’s assessment that progression in regards to that of technological devices has been more beneficial for society than it has been negative. With that said, I can’t lay down my counter to Kelly’s argument without exploring all aspects of the impact of the device both positively and negatively.
The good. When the schematics of the iPod were introduced to society, many individuals saw it as a tool that could be utilized for the benefit of human society, or to be more specific, a quality-of-life enhancing tool. Heather Holmes would fall under this category of individuals. Holmes, a member of the Good Samaritan Society as well a therapy-teaching Professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, saw potential in the iPod’s customizable music playlist feature, specifically in that the feature could be used therapeutically. Through the implementation of personalized music programs, Holmes and her crew, “create an experience [through the usage of the iPod], and all of a sudden, someone in the group [that is a part of the program] will have a moment when they speak five or six words—like ‘I remember dancing at my wedding.” Keep in mind that the people who take part in these programs have severe cases of dementia and Alzheimer’s, both of which impair their ability to recollect memories greatly. I believe that in respect to the therapeutic field, that only the iPod as a mp3-playing device has the capability to “create a[] [memory triggering] experience” like the one Holmes describes. I sincerely believe that listening to music, especially music that I sincerely enjoy, has a therapeutic impact on my mental psyche, and the progression of the mp3 player in the form of the iPod caters to just that impact exactly.
The bad. People tend to skip over the underlying negative environmental facets of a device because they propose unsettling thoughts and scenarios. For instance, a majority of society tends to not realize or flat out ignore the fact that the energy used to power society’s music storage devices is derived from the burning of coal—an activity “that leads to air pollution, climate change, and other problems tucked neatly away behind an electronic screen”(Biello, “How Toxic Is Your iPod?”). David Biello alerts his listeners to the environmental problems associated with the original iPod in the following podcast.
Although, as Biello puts it in his podcast, “Apple is more brown than green. But it’s getting greener” (Biello, “How Toxic is Your iPod?”), the fact that iPod is still overall “brown,” meaning bad for the environment, is cause for concern seeing as recently the consequences of the continual promotion of climate change through anthropological actions, such as the burning of coal, have a detrimental impact on the future of human society. Another phenomenon that can be attributed to the iPod is that it promotes a static human behavior, or to be more specific, promotes what Tom de Castella refers to as “headphone culture”. “Headphone culture” is best described as the generational movement of isolating oneself by listening to digital music via headphones linked to an mp3 player, in this case the iPod. The statements of psychologist Oliver James best sum up the psychological, antisocial impact the iPod causes. James argues that the iPod puts people in a “self-absorbed and atomized” state of mind, which causes people to prefer being alone in their own bubble (Castella, “Has the iPod made us Anti-Social”). I find this assessment of where the collective mental state that society is moving towards by Oliver James as being very similar to that of the future collective mental state of society E.M. Forster suggests in his book The Machine Stops. Forster describes in his book the future of human society’s preference of technological isolation in what Forster describes as “a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee”(1). Although the iPod doesn’t create an actual physical cell that blocks people from their human counterparts, the iPod does create an intangible social barrier that removes people from their human surroundings. Both the collective psychological and environmental impact the iPod has on society is overtly detrimental. It is hard to believe that this is also only the tip of this big, bad iceberg.
The ugly. What most music fans, and people in general, will point at, as the largest negative impact attributed to the progression of the mp3 player in the form of the iPod is its role in the rapid decline of the sale of physical records by music stores. NBC News author Rosa Golijan elaborates on the iPod’s role by stating, “Once you had an iPod, the iTunes Store had you. Who wanted to purchase an overpriced CD, go home, pop it into a computer, rip the tunes and then sync them to a gadget? The iPod allowed Apple to make its mobile computing revolution, with a little help from its red-hot media store.”(Golijan, “iTunes turns 10: How Apple Music Store Killed Old Music Industry”). The answer to Golijan’s rhetoric question is not many people as illustrated by the pie chart below.
As the data of the pie chart above suggests, the revenue stream of the U.S. music industry has experienced a gigantic shift in its landscape in just the last eight years. With this information in mind, it’s not hard to understand why “Tower Records, a hallowed music store chain with a 46-year history, shuttered its doors at the end of 2006”(Golijan, “iTunes turns 10: How Apple Music Store Killed Old Music Industry”). Some editorials such as The Nation went as far as to say that the day Tower Records “shuttered its doors” was “The Day the Music Died,” because all of the events that transpired that caused this collapse of a record giant can be traced back to Apple’s initial introduction of the iPod. If the mp3 player had never progressed into what is the iPod, record stores such as Tower Records may still be bustling with business today. I personally hold this to be true seeing as I would have never discarded my first CD player if the iPod had not captivated me with its dazzling and versatile features, and I think a lot of people would agree with me. Once the iPod had entered my life paired with iTunes, I lost the desire to purchase entire albums and ultimately saw buying albums as economically impractical because most of the time I didn’t enjoy every track on an album and thus moved in favor of just purchasing one or a couple of my favorite cuts off of an album. Thus, the iPod effectively conditioned my generation as a whole into purchasing music in a much different format than that of past generations, which were conditioned in the way to buy music by the record labels. Apple had flipped the music industry’s record selling model on its head, and not surprisingly, the industry declined because of the rapid increase of volatility in the market.
Now that I have touched on the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of the iPod in my analysis, I think it is hard for one to disagree with my argument that the Apple iPod’s negative impacts outweigh its positive ones because of its adverse environmental, social, and worse yet, industry-killing effects. The continued distress of the music industry and the increasing anti-social behavior of society to this day make me wonder if society would have been better off without the iPod. It’s a steep claim, but at the same time, taking in all the evidence I have presented, it is an understandable one. Maybe in the case of the progress of technology the positive-negative balance nature of it comes out to a slightly more positive impact on human society, but in the case of the iPod, I would argue that this is not the case. The progress of technological devices and instruments is a tricky thing, which we as humans have yet to perfect; we still make mistakes that set us back. Ultimately, we can learn from the progression of the iPod to weigh the impacts of certain creations more carefully in the future. If we don’t, we might witness the disillusionment of an industry like that of the record industry once again.
Works Cited:
Forster, E. M. The Machine Stops. London: Penguin, 2011. Print.
“Full Access to IPods Enhances Quality of Life at Good Samaritan Society-Millard.” Music and Memory. Web. 25 Oct. 2014. <http://musicandmemory.org/2013/04/23/full-access-to-ipods-enhances-quality-of-life-at-good-samaritan-society-millard/>.
“Has the IPod Made Us Anti-social?” BBC News. Web. 26 Oct. 2014. <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15066957>.
“How Toxic Is Your IPod?” Scientific American Global RSS. Web. 23 Oct. 2014. <http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/how-toxic-is-your-ipod-08-10-15/>.
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. Print.
Miller, Jared T. “The IPod Turns 10: How It Shaped Music History | TIME.com.” Time. Time. Web. 24 Oct. 2014. <http://techland.time.com/2011/10/21/the-ipod-turns-10-how-it-shaped-music-history/>.
“ITunes Turns 10: How Apple Music Store Killed Old Music Industry – NBC News.” NBC News. Web. 26 Oct. 2014. <http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/itunes-turns-10-how-apple-music-store-killed-old-music-f6C9633923>.