Why iPod?

My sons, Adam and Doug, are 30 and 31, respectively. Doug, a lawyer, spends about as much time online as he needs to do his work, check his e-mail, keep up with his fantasy baseball league, and add the occasional factoid to his impressively large fund of trivia.

Adam, on the other hand, loves technology and gadgets. A New York City elementary school teacher, he specializes in using computers to teach math. He's a dedicated Mac person who can't pass a computer without doing a bit of surfing and he's always dreaming about his next cool computer. And even when money is tight, he somehow keeps acquiring technological marvels.

Several months ago, while visiting Doug, I mentioned in passing that Adam had just bought an iPod.

"What's an iPod?" Doug asked.

"It's a little machine that lets you download MP3 files and listen to them anywhere," I said. "Sort of like a Walkman.

"What's an MP3 file?" Doug asked.

At the time, I thought (as I often have), So much for the myth that tech literacy is a function of age. It's more about your temperament and cast of mind. I also admit to a bit of surprise, given Doug's interest in pop music, but I didn't think much more about it.

By now, though, many people have seen the hip new iPod ad on television. They're aware of the music industry lawsuits against young people who download and share copyrighted songs. (In one instance, papers were served on a twelve-year-old girl.) They may even know about the lauch of iTunes, Apple's online 99 cents-a-song download service (and its new 88 cents-a-song competition from Walmart), legal and presumably profitable replacements for the old Napster. They have some inkling that MP3 is a file format used to compress, store, and transmit music while retaining very high sound quality. And they may know that other electronics manufacturers have entered the market with a half-dozen iPod wannabes.

This week, in a provocative Valentine's Day essay in the Village Voice, Izzy Grinspan reflects on the coolness and intimacy of the iPod. Back in the day, says Grinspan, you might have given your valentine a mix tape, "a neat little package of songs carefully selected to say something about both you and your understanding of the recipient." Now that tape recordings are a quaint anachronism, Grinspan and Grinspan's boyfriend hit on a 21st century replacement: the "iPod swap."

The iPod not only encompasses the breadth (or narrowness) and uniqueness of its owner's musical tastes. By recording "what songs have been played both most recently and most often," says Grinspan, it also provides a record of his or her "internal aural landscape." Sharing that landscape with your valentine thus becomes an "intimate, almost invasive activity."

What's more, the iPod -- complete with white "earbuds" or headphones -- epitomizes cool, sexy, distinctive design. Users instantly peg each other as members of an exclusive "club" and have even begun to greet by "briefly plugging their earbud cords into each other's jacks." Whether this casual, technologically mediated gesture is one of community, as Grinspan notes, or anonymous intimacy, I find the sexual metaphor totally obvious and mildly chilling. Much like your anonymously intimate relationship with the marketers who stalk your cookie crumb trail through cyberspace or design your collaboratively filtered "personal" page at Amazon.com.

None of this is to imply that the iPod isn't fundamentally about music, that it isn't an avatar of brilliant design, or that it doesn't combine personalization, intimacy, and community. I do suggest that the meanings of those concepts have changed, and that they will continue to evolve in a culture driven by media, marketing, and technological innovation, all at a relentless pace. Much like privacy, whose implications I'll explore in much greater depth, these are examples of how technology challenges us to examine the boundaries of the self.