Abstract
The admirable series to which this book belongs is called Object Lessons. Its inveterate and exhilarating focus is on the hidden lives of such ordinary things as cigarette lighters, bookshelves, bread, socks, veils, golf balls and high heels. It is this range, along with the intention of turning things inside out and making us see them in a different light, that makes the series appear as an early 21st century extension of the project initiated in Barthes’ Mythologies. The ordinary object which Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow places under the lens is the personal stereo. The paradoxical feature of this item of cultural technology is that it puts our immediate lived environment on hold and immerses us in an intensified experience of whatever we are listening to, isolating us from what is spatially and temporally proximate and connecting us to what is spatially and temporally distant. That at least is the case with music, though not necessarily with radio, which is often temporally immediate. Whatever it is we choose to listen to, that choice is entirely personal, as opposed to, for example, the music we may consensually agree upon for a wedding reception or a funeral. In addition, what is distinctive about the personal stereo is the way, once our choice is made, it cocoons us in internal sound to the exclusion of all exterior sources of sound.
It is this which was the key break with the past when the first, and most famous, personal stereo, the Sony Walkman, was introduced in 1979. It was not the separation of sight and sound, for that goes all the way back to the advent of phonography and the radio. It was neither the portability of music, for that had arrived with the transistor radio in the 1950s, nor was it the capacity for creating a musical miscellany, for that was what many people did in making mixtapes on cassettes or (to a lesser extent) on earlier reel-to-reel domestic tape machines. What made the personal stereo special was that, although isolated stereophonic listening certainly had its antecedents, the device very much advanced and enhanced this particular modality of audio experience. The story of this starts with the Sony Walkman, and much of the book is taken up with telling it from the point of its invention onwards, with the details about the development of Sony as an international company, and the close relationship between its founders, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, being among the most fascinating.
Tuhus-Dubrow tells the story of the personal stereo through a threefold narrative schema: the categories of novelty, norm and nostalgia are those deployed in tracing the sequenced trajectory of the Walkman but, delightfully, the benefit of these temporally defined categories can be extended beyond the Walkman. While always allowing for modification, they can be readily applied to the development of any popular technology of the modern period, all along the course from its genesis to its obsolescence. In the case of the Walkman, its novelty dimension was beset by legal battles over credit for its invention, and these – centred around the contestations of Andreas Pavel – are outlined and discussed before the ambivalent features of its mainstream reception are dealt with. Although some would contest it, these included a largely welcome contrast with the boom box, which was ‘more social and gregarious, but also intrusive’, whereas the personal stereo was ‘more polite and private, but also withdrawn’ (p. 43).
As is so often the case with what initially entrances us with new cultural technologies, the wonder, excitement and joy become all too soon absorbed into the humdrum rhythms of day-to-day life, and in that assimilation, the manifold qualities of first encounter are rapidly diminished or easily forgotten. In exactly this manner, the novel strangeness of the personal stereo shifted into mundane familiarity, and we then entered the stage of its banal normalisation. Everyone had to have one, and regardless of whether that demand diminished its quality as a status symbol, it became well-nigh ubiquitous. The personal stereo soon grew into being a staple feature of everyday urban life, perhaps especially in those intervals of transit between one place and another. Controversy continued – inter alia, was the device a violation of the tacit principles of interpersonal relations, or an enrichment of aesthetic experience, albeit for the most part individualistic? – yet regardless of this, the Walkman in particular ‘was frequently cited as one of the quintessential amenities of Western life’ (p. 76). As such, people became for the most part readily accustomed to it and to the various ways in which it changed social etiquette, manners and mores.
And so inexorably to the past, for personal cassette players are now definitively associated with what has so quickly gone before. They have now been surpassed by newer digital technologies, most notably the iPod and smartphone. These are far more versatile and, perhaps decisively, reintegrate visual and sonic elements of experience where these were lost by earlier technological media. Despite these advances, some people, not necessarily in a contrarian manner, prefer pre-smartphone days and in curious as well as various ways fondly hark back to them. Such technostalgia is part of a wider celebration of analogue objects. The soi-disant limitations of analogue media and what Tuhus-Dubrow felicitously refers to as their ‘underdog charm’ (p. 101) have become transmuted into what is deemed most valuable about them. Nostalgia can at times be a critical response to deficiencies in the present or to the downside consequences of subsequent developments, and that too is in part why the Walkman is still revered.
The chapter dealing with this stage and dimension of Walkman–human relations is the least satisfactory in the book. Its conceptual treatment of nostalgia is rudimentary and lax; it fails to distinguish at all properly between different manifestations of nostalgiaand so to recognise its diverse impulses, forms and attractions; added to which, its engagement with the academic literature on memory in general and nostalgia in particular is no more than perfunctory. This is a shame, because otherwise the threefold schema for handling the trajectory from technological invention to supersession is neat and works well as a way of organising the chosen story of the personal stereo. That disappointment aside, it should be emphasised that the book is very much an enjoyable read. It knows its object of study well, and it makes a number of interesting and insightful points about its key characteristics and how they fit into the manifold affordances of media technologies along a broader and more general socio-historical spectrum. While lacking the sophistication and originality of Michael Bull’s Sounding Out the City, Tuhus-Dubrow offers a lucid, accessible, amiable and engaging introduction to the personal stereo. Her book is a welcome addition to the Object Lessons series.