An encounter with the past
Posted by Nick Milne on June 29, 2009
A thirteen-year-old boy in England gave up his iPod for a week to use a thirty-year-old Sony Walkman instead. The results are strangely delightful:
From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.
When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.
[. . .]
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Do read the whole thing; it’s short and surprisingly well-written.
I’m old enough to remember – and to have had – Walkmans, though of a somewhat sleeker variety than the ominous silver doorstop with which young Scott Campbell was saddled. It’s easy to forget that there’s a whole generation of kids out there now who were born in such scandalously recent years as 1996 and for whom the trappings of my particular childhood are as foreign and appalling as were those of the generation that preceded mine. I came too late for 8-Track and Beta, but the children’s shows I watched still made jokes about them.
Perhaps decades from now urchins will look back with disdain upon the clumsy necessity of using one’s fingers to operate electronics. They’ll pause between infusions from their subcutaneous nutrient packs to express their scorn to their real-time data feed’s subscriber base. Somewhere, a man will sigh.
Meanwhile, the third of the world’s population that has no access to computers or high-level electronics will continue to live a real and notably human life.
