iPod: the bubble of control
February 28, 2008 – 7:51 pmI wrote last week about the presentation by someone from ITV Imagine at a Digital Horizons seminar; disappointment at the channels failure of imagination was offset by an unexpectedly insightful talk given by a researcher from the University of Sussex, Michael Bull.
Michael focuses on people’s use of media products as a kind of litmus paper to study the changing social world, particularly personal music devices. In 2000 he undertook a study of the Walkman, although Sony refused to let him use the name in the resulting book and has recently completed a survey of 1000 iPod users across the world. The results of that research are published in Sound Moves: IPod Culture and Urban Experience.
What interests Michael is how people use media devices to modulate and fine tune their environment. The iPod allows people to adjust their cognition, giving them a degree of control over the world they travel through, keeping them immersed in a consistent state from home, through the commute, to work and back again. They maintain a bubble of control, creating a fluid, seamless transition from space to space.
Technologies that afford control and provide reassurance in the face of insecurity are likely to be successful. For women use of the iPod can be empowering: they are ‘engaged’, focused elsewhere on the street or public transport, they are less likely to attract eye contact from strangers. Some people use it to regulate intrusions from their mobile phones, keeping one earphone in and sliding attention between the music and the caller.
He described the iPod as a ‘hyper-post-fordist’ product where
Fordist = ‘any colour you like as long as it’s black
Post-Fordist = niche marketed products where the manufacturer or retailer keeps tight control of an audio-visual environment to maintain harmony with the brand (you don’t find Levis in Asda);
Hyper Post-Fordist = iPod enabling user to create their own environment and work out their own relationship to a product or experience by, for example, using in the gym.
But while mobile technologies allow you to commune with your own world or your absent personal social world, they separate you from the social world around you. The more we seek warmth and reassurance be creating our personal bubbles of experience, the less we interact with people and the places where we are present.
Michael cited the experience of Duke University which dropped its programme of giving students free iPods when they realised that all the social meeting places around the campus were falling into silent disuse.
