(Source)
I've been meaning to write this post for some time now; here goes.
I recently (i.e., a year ago... maybe two) read a couple of books back to back which I initially thought were unrelated. The first was Sound moves: iPod culture and urban experience. The book is an ethnographic study of iPod users in large urban centers. Based on hundreds of survey respondents, Bulls discusses how iPod users use the device to mediate between themselves and their surroundings. The sentence that struck me the hardest appears on p. 133: "In iPod culture, successful experience is invariably mediated experience." Here are a few representative quotations from the survey respondents:
Oddly enough, I'll use my cellphone over my headphones with the music on quite a lot these days. It really changes how you view your conversations, because the other person's voice is coloured by what you're listening to. (Ashvin, p. 57)
A person with headphones on gives off an appearance of not wanting to be disturbed. There are times, mostly at work or walking to and from work, when I just want to be left alone. Wearing the iPod insulates me from other people in my surroundings. (Amy, p. 32)
There are many more quotations along these lines; many of them were fairly shocking to my sensibilities. It's a good book. I'm personally hoping for a second edition: I think the book came out just on the edge of the iPhone explosion, and, while Bulls does discuss mobile phones quite a lot, I think a chapter on the iPhone (and smart phones in general) would be a tremendous addition to an otherwise very interesting book.
The second book (again, totally unrelated--I thought) was Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which is the story of Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate from a well-to-do family, who gave up everything to roam the country. I don't know that the passage would have stood out to me had I not just finished Bulls's book, but the following really caught my eye:
McCandless had graduated in June 1990 from Emory University in Atlanta, where he distinguished himself as a history/anthropology major and was offered but declined membership in Phi Beta Kappa, insisting that titles and honors were of no importance. His education had been paid for by a college fund established by his parents; there was some $20,000 in this account at the time of his graduation, money his parents thought he intended to use for law school. Instead, he donated the entire sum to the Oxford Famine Relief Fund. Then, without notifying any friends or family members, he loaded all his belongings into a decrepit yellow Datsun and headed west without itinerary, relieved to shed a life of abstraction and security, a life he felt was removed from the heat and throb of the real world. Chris McCandless intended to invent a new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. (italics are mine)
(Incidentally, you can read a good sized excerpt of the beginning of the book here; the passage above appears on page 3)
Here's an interesting dichotomy between those for whom successful experience is mediated and those for whom successful experience is completely unmediated. Lately, I've found myself running without my iPod more often than with (quite possibly because I'm doing shorter runs these days; you need something to distract you when you're running for three hours). I'm doing my best to wallow in unfiltered experience: clearing my mind, paying attention to my body, my surroundings. Same thing with my time on the bike (I would never wear headphones on a bike for safety reasons). I'm content to take in my surroundings and just think.
Which category do you fall into? Why? Talk amongst yourselves...