home | hauntedcastle.org | sao bento music | mobile | about
www.flickr.com
|
Recent Posts -> so much goin... -> mobisodes in... -> mobile album... -> NIME 2005... -> game music... ->
« elephant paths | Main | ball rolling game soon to be in english »
July 18, 2004
soundabout @08:12 PM
Just read a really interesting article about sony's first generation of the walkman, then called the soundabout.
It didn't record or come with a speaker. But it was sociable: Two could listen at once through a pair of headphone jacks, and an orange button called the Hotline let you talk over the music.
It's pretty strange in retrospect to think about the concern sony execs had about the social impact of people walking around with headphones. (Makes you wonder what they would have said if someone told them that everyone and their mother would be walking around Tokyo with a phone pressed against their ear...)
"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."
At least initially, sony was hip to this criticism, and equipped the soundabout with a hotline function, which reminds me a lot of the current trend in iPod land of sharing your music over rendevous -- letting people physically close to you listen in, share your experience. Certainly, there is something to be said about the power of synchronicity in these shared, social situations.
Anyway, it's kind of a shame Sony took the hotline function away after just a couple of years.
link to the bellville.com article.
posted by will | comments (2) | 
permalink
| all rights william carter |
| view cc license |
Now we just need to get the 'hotline' feature working with voip, and the friends are back.
Posted by: mbolas at July 19, 2004 09:13 PM
Posted by: mbolas at July 25, 2004 02:04 AM
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)