The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening

I wanted to investigate how iPod users re-inscribe their experiences of commuting through the use of music. I recently saw a television documentary that discussed briefly how the Japanese were the first consumers to use the iPod to give them an unprecedented power of control over their experience of time and space. The users were living in an environment that is busy and overcrowded through the levels of commuters travelling to work every day. The users would manage their moods and orientation within this crowded environment through the ‘micro-management of personalised music’.

I am going to be using an article written by Michael Bull from the Department of Media Studies, University of Sussex, UK called ‘No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening’ to help me argue my points.

Within our cities people commute everyday often by means of public transport to and from their places of work. These people have a need for ‘social proximity and contact in daily life’ (Katz & Aakhus, 2002) With the introduction of the MP3 player the user has complete access to their entire music collection whilst on the move, therefore allowing them to be ‘warmly wrapped up in their own personal space’ (Bull, 2005, p343) and morphing their surrounding space into a visual mindset that can reflect their own mood. Older devices meant that consumers were limited to only a few tracks to choose from therefore meaning that they would have to listen to the same track often, this would then mean the user would be forcing the environment that they were attempting to inhabit to mimic their own mindset. With the creation of the iPod the user is able to choose from thousands of tracks ultimately allowing them to manage their thoughts feelings and observations through any track they like.

Michael Bull states that consumers use the iPod to ‘fill in the gaps’ in-between communication or meetings. I would agree with this statement to the point in which I consider how Apple have also introduced a complete range of products to compliment the iPod. The iPod has become a part of the home, the car and many other environments because of these products that allow your iPod to communicate with your Hi-Fi, car, computer etc and so therefore giving the user the ‘unprecedented ability to weave the disparate threads of the day into one uniform soundtrack’ (Bull, 2005).

It is possible to alike this idea to Raymond Williams’ arguments that people are privatising themselves and the media that they consume to ‘the living room - and increasingly the bedroom’. People are shutting out what is not important in their lives and the ‘desire for company or ‘occupancy’ whilst moving through the city is thus contextualised through the daily or habitual use of a variety of media’ (Bull, 2005, p.345). The freedom of mobile sound media enables the user to maintain a sense of ‘intimacy’ whilst moving through the city. Adorno in his book ‘Introduction to the Sociology of Music’ states that ‘music creates a form of sociability in a world that is increasingly bereft of it. As such, music performs as an ideological function of integrating the user into the world’. I personally believe that this refers to the fact that people hate unusable time. Consumers need something to capture their imagination in order for it to be important in their lives. Day-to-day commuting does not accommodate this capturing of imagination so therefore people will seek to cover up these irrelevant areas by converting them into the soundtrack of the street. Consumers can use their portable music change the environment and create their own individual movie, unrealised by public around them. For example a user can walk down the same street and it will look busy and colourful one moment and then – when a different song starts – it can change to a mysterious and unnerving place.

The creation of a personalised soundworld through iPod use creates a form of accompanied solitude for its users in which they feel empowered, in control and self-sufficient as they travel through the spaces of the city. iPod's tend to be non-interactive in the sense that users construct fantasies and maintain a feeling of security precisely by not interacting with others or the environment.