Stephen Levy’s very readable story of the obscenely popular iPod came just after I bought my new computer, and served a welcome distraction as I imported all my music. As an interesting publishing twist on the ‘shuffle’ idea, various editions of this book have the self-contained chapters (with titles like “Cool” and “Apple” and “Personal”) re-arranged in different orders, sandwiched between the intro and the coda. Kind of cool.
Luckily, this book is more biography than love letter. There’s a lot of industry history, delving into early portable music hits like Sony’s Walkman, a bit of the sordid history of the music publishing industry in the midst of the mp3 revolution, insider perspectives on Apple’s development process, whether or not shuffle mode is really random, and so on.
And of course, there’s a lot about infatuation with the iPod itself. Levy cites Virginia Postrel’s book on industrial design:
Having spent a century or more focused primarily on other goals–solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs, making goods and services widely available, saving energy–we are increasingly engaged in making our world special. More people in more aspects of life are drawing pleasure and meaning from he way their persons, places, and things look and feel.
Thank you, Capitalism. Of course, recognizing that progress is one of the reasons the iPod is so successful amid products with better specs. “More” isn’t always more. It’s just a beautifully designed object that’s a joy to use, in the way we choose. As Levy says:
shuffle turns out to be the techna franca of the digital era–not just a feature on a gadget but an entire way of viewing the world, representing the power that comes from aggregating content from a variety of sources and playing it back in an order that render irrelevant the intended ordering by those who produced or first distributed the content.
Yes, we like control. More, please.
Mark Larson 