Rick Reuben wrote:Cassette walkmans are much less destructive to human attention spans than .mp3 boxes, because the cassette plays you the songs just like vinyl does, in the order that the artist intended, at the proper pace. iPods give you the option to jump all over the place, 10 secs of one song, a minute of another, the iPod wheel much like the comfortable TV remote. the iPod wheel encourages you to make snap judgements on music just like the TV remote lets you scan from channel to channel like a zombie. It trains you to have a shorter attention span.
This assumes everyone using a Walkman recorded cassettes that included albums in their entirety and didn't make mixtapes, which I know I did a lot, as did many of my friends. It also assumes people never used the rewind or fast-forward keys, which (again) I know I did quite frequently -- these functions are a lot easier to work with on a iPod, but they certainly had their precedent in the earlier technology.
It bothers me greatly that we are living in an increasingly post-literate society, but I think a widespread disrespect towards the written word has far more to do with this problem than digital audio technology. The fact that literally millions of kids line up to read Harry Potter novels suggests to me that there is still an audience for a good solid book in our hyperactive society, but it has to be made into a pop culture phenomenon in order for anyone to be interested. That's a far bigger problem than kids wanting to skip tunes on the crappy My Chemical Romance albums they've downloaded (and personally I'd say skipping through that stuff is a rare sign of taste and intelligence on their part).
