CONFRONTING TECHNOLOGY

"He had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book."

Wired has a list of 100 things your kids may never know, which is an interesting series of pop culture and technological bits, but one stood out for me: listening to an audio tape. The Wired article links to a BBC Magazine article by a teenage boy who tried out a Walkman for the first time in honor of the 30th anniversary of the device. Scott Campbell was a bit confused by the machine when he first saw it. It was huge and unattractive to him, just silver and not sleek and colorful. He complained that the weight was enough to pull down low-slung idiot shorts.

He was also baffled by some of the features the Walkman had:

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.

There was also a bit of ignorance in his understanding of tapes and sound fidelity. He complained that the sound was warbled and hissed, thinking it was the battery power, which ran down too soon; a good set of batteries can last days of normal use if you have a fresh batch. The warble and his was because he was listening to an old tape, one of his dad's from decades ago. Even the best stapes simply do not hold up over time very well and eventually the sound decays and the steady, smooth spooling action begins to stick slightly and becomes uneven. Using a brand new high end tape recording a CD he'd find the sound was extraordinary.

He complained about the capacity, annoyed that the 60 minute tapes he used only held 12 songs on a side. Well, yes, use a bigger tape and you get a lot more, but even the 100 minute tapes don't compare to the vast gigs of storage you get on a modern digital player.

Yet at the same time, that's a feature, not a bug. When you have only 100 minutes to work with on a tape, you get creative. What songs go on and what don't matter more: you can't fast forward past a junk song easily, so you stick with only good stuff that you like. The song sequence matters more when you are unable to hit the shuffle button as well. What song follows each could build a mood, tell a story, or fit a theme. If you liked a girl and wanted to tell her how, but weren't much good at it in person, you could send her a tape to break the ice and let her know. If you were angry you could work up an angry metal tape and stomp around to the music. I've made mix tapes of rain music, mix tapes of all women singers or all songs about war. The 800 million song mp3 mix gives you an amazing variety of unpredictable songs, but it doesn't give you the ability to craft a story the same way, unless you build a playlist limited to specific songs and treat it like ... a cassette tape player.

Overall Mr Campbell only liked one feature more than his i-pod: the dual headphone jacks on the top, allowing two people to listen at once. That feature was only on the first Walkman series, because it just wasn't used much. I grew up with the Walkman in my teenage years, I listened to various versions and alternates of it for decades as I bicycled and walked around. Now I don't listen to music constantly and appreciate quiet a bit more, but I still have one for trips. And on a cold day, those over the ear phones double as ear warmers.

It is interesting to see how a young person tries to work with older technology. See, its not that young people are more technologically conversant than older. Its that they're more familiar with the "language" and patterns of newer technology. Give them something before that pattern and they have to learn it just like older folks do the newer.

*Hat tip Conservative Grapevine for the Wired story