is a cautionary tale of the dangers of loud string ties.




At Cabrillo and La Playa, where the sounds of the surf still [but never still] are a constant rhythm, a lonely and easily missed memorial plaque quietly mentions the former use of this long since reappropriated space: the raucous amusements and excited magic of San Francisco’s now nearly forgotten Playland-at-the-Beach. Once a gloriously embodied space of revelry, today this location is filled with a monotonous, undifferentiated wall of condominiums, a presumably “safe” Safeway supermarket, and a bus layover terminal. People shift, pace, or vacantly stare in quite obvious annoyance at their need to wait, as if they can’t wait to get to work. There is no evidence any are aware of the former sounds, the mix of curiosities, celebrants, children, Ferris wheel, roller-coaster, merry-go-round, fortune tellers, mechanical amusements and animated hucksters; the cultural clash that was this re-embodied space’s heritage.

For two hours each morning, the normal bus routes servicing this terminus are augmented by the 31AX Balboa ‘A’ Express. Starting here it loads passengers for thirty blocks, then, without further stops, it “speeds” toward the Financial District. Sixty-plus passengers at a time, at least half standing, endure, in what at first seems like silence, the ride. The bus’ gears grind; adjacent and sometimes distant vehicles honk and squeal, rev and belch; a few long-time commuters or just arrived tourist couples converse quietly; then you begin to hear it: the kaka-kaka-kaka of someone’s ears being fried. It doesn’t always go this way. On some rides the perfume of garlic, kimchee, methane and borscht is the more obvious reminder one is being packed. Other times the ride is almost pleasant.

By my count, on a typical commute, about one quarter of the passengers are wearing ties. Headed for the Financial District, it is not surprising to find formally attired businessmen. But, in this laid-back city of permissiveness, it is noteworthy that this percentage has recently seen a sharp upturn.

The cravat was originally a rank-denoting detail of Croatian military uniforms, the term itself a corruption of their country’s name. The new wearers, with their string ties, would doubtless disclaim any militarism in their personal décor, yet it turns out there is a decided defensiveness in this modernized apparel. The string ties, of course, are the “Y” connecting ear to ear, then dropping across the wearer’s chest in a highly fashionable thin white line, to end in a pocket, a pack—or a purse. In fact, it seems, most of these modern iPod wearers are women. The stories of these wearers indicate many have a continuing need for defense.

In their introductory essay to The Anthropology of Space and Place, authors and editors Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga argue that “The space occupied by the body…contracts and expands.” (2) “Social relations” is one of their postulated causes for this varying volume of occupied space. In a crowded bus one’s personal space undergoes forced contraction in response to the temporarily constricting social relationships intrinsic to public transportation. The bus itself, separate even from its driver, enforces this decrease through its disembodied command to, “For the benefit of those getting on the bus, please move to the rear of the bus.” However, even without this command, the simple crush of bodies is more than sufficient to cause a noticeable and generally unwelcome reduction in each commuter’s normal personal space. For some, the iPod becomes a way to counteract this reduction.

One’s body space is not purely volumetric. Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga state that “the body is best conceived as a multiplicity.” They go on to describe body mappings including up to five dimensions: “the individual body, social body, and body politic” as well as “the consumer body and the medical body.” (3) These extra mappings are not so much intended to describe an individual’s interactions with other cartographies as they are intended to underscore the idea that “individuality is relative and dependent on other social beings.” (4) In describing the iPod user’s relationships within this multiplicity of mappings it becomes increasingly evident that the ostensibly independence-seeking iPod user is in fact entirely inscribed within a social dependency: that she has become a member of the pod. The iPod exerts clear agency across at least four of these mappings.

The iPod user’s individual body is decorated by and in intimate and constant physical contact with the device. Although momentary circumstances, such as a bus ride, may temporarily modify [in the case of a bus ride, constrict] an individual’s personal body space, the iPod gives its user considerable control over the individual’s mental space, often greatly expanding it, or at least transporting it, in a direction likely unrelated to the vector of the physical body. The iPod wearing bus rider is clear demonstration that an individual’s personal space is not simply physical.

iPod users gain social membership, and, by means of their “Y” string tie, often publicly announce this membership, within a social grouping generally perceived, at least by its members, as hip, young, and desirable. This acquisition of social membership is somewhat paradoxical, for the very act of wearing an iPod is a removal of oneself from most external social interactions; nonetheless, for the moment at least, the iPod (5) are hip. Occasionally iPod users create more obvious social connections. In some cases two people share a single iPod by each wearing only one earpiece. Although this has the disadvantage of depriving each listener of a true stereo experience, high quality audio is not a particular goal of the iPod. iPods are also used as audio sources for external amplifiers, to carve out physical spaces of shared audio. In this useage the amplified iPod is essentially an updated boom box, an already proven tool for creating and defining social bodies.

The consumer body is clearly the target of the iPod’s manufacturers, distributors and profiteers. Amidst years of increasingly dismal sales for the prerecorded music industry, the iPod stands virtually alone as indicator that the public retains any leftover willingness to pay for music. Apple’s product design and marketing campaign are brilliant successes. One acknowledgment of Apple’s success is the rising flood of similar products and advertising campaigns. A recent bus shelter advertisement near Columbus and Water touts the gloriousness of Creative Technology Limited’s similar product, the “Zen V Plus.” This ad portrays a beautiful young woman, her hands over her ears, her head tilted back in obvious ecstasy, while a white cord crosses and arguably caresses her left breast. It is not clear whether this ad is intended to appeal to men or women, but it is certainly a testament to the iPod’s phenomenal success.

That the iPod has an effect on the medical body is known, but whether that effect is a net positive or negative remains unclear. No doubt there will be users who blast their eardrums into ruin. Further, there are an increasing number of at least apocryphal stories of iPod wearers so blissfully unaware of their surroundings that they “forget they’re not just an avatar in Second Life…cars are heavy.” (6) On the other hand, music has long been associated with healing. It is entirely believable that surrounding one’s life with music leads to a healthier body.

Surrounding oneself with music, however, does not guarantee health. In director Lee Tamahor’s 1995 film, Once Were Warriors, (7) Jake the Muss, who obviously loves music and sings at every opportunity, has little else of positivity in his life. His preferred “home” is the “Royal,” a bar named after the monarchy that stole his ancestral homeland and gave him alcoholism in exchange. In this wrenching tale of former New Zealand Maoris now relegated to “living” in urban slums, we see the stultifying effects of loss of place. To complain about the loss of Playland seems quite petty next to Jake’s loss of country, pride, home, love, and dignity. Yet we should not dismiss Jake’s loss as too severe to inform our own lives. Here, too, in our own country, available recreational space is continually removed, and the possibility that those who don’t already own a home can buy one is now increasingly remote. At least Jake could sing with his friends. The iPod generation merely has a way to forget. How is that a healthier mapping?

Not everyone wants a healthy body, or at least wants the health of their body known. One of the interviewees for this ethnographic study, an attractive art school coed (8), offered an unexpected explanation for her use of the iPod, “I’m tired of getting cat-called on the street.” (9) Within this short answer I began to sense an explanation for the disproportionate, nearly two-to-one ratio, of predominately female iPod users. At first I thought my counts (10) revealed some other sexist mapping. I thought perhaps the men had all driven to work, and it was only the secretarial staff I saw on the streets of the Financial District every morning. I thought perhaps more women cared deeply about music. Perhaps, to some extent, all of these are true, but I would never have thought of the cat-call problem had I not actually conducted interviews.

Much of the research supported my original suppositions. When I began the research I was convinced the iPod was, at best, basically a successful marketing fad. My feelings are revealed in the title of this essay. I thought of the iPod as a people, deprived of individuality by an entity not unlike the aliens in the epigraphic film.

Etymologically the word “iPod” seems to be derived from a catachrestically (11) inappropriate conjoining of the singular space of the individual “I” and the multiply inhabited space of the group term “pod.” The “I” we think we understand well enough. Pod may be a bit more complex. In addition to referring to groups of sugar peas or killer whales, pod also has the potentially male ego inflating connotation of an anatomical pouch—although the small size of the iPod seems to cast that reading aside. A more likely meaning is that the use of the iPod as a way to enhance one’s walking time is underscored by the meaning of “pod” as a suffix: “foot.” Neither group nor foot seems particularly justified for a product so isolationistic and typically sedentary. Nonetheless its users generally do feel they are part of the hip, active young, and I do think the product name brilliantly invites admission to this consumer body.

Analog music recordings became increasingly better as the Twentieth Century unfolded. From wax cylinders to 78 rpm records to LP’s there was clear and steady sonic improvement. Digitization of music seems to have irrevocably reversed that once glorious evolution. Compact Discs, introduced in the early 1980’s, were marketed to a world increasingly wowed by the power of computers. CD’s were believed to be just one more example of digital perfection. Few knew it was even possible that digital and perfect could be anything other than synonymous.

By now, one would think there would be something better. Indeed, a few audiophile specialty systems exist, but none have significant market share. Instead the idea of “sharing” music—essentially a misnomer meaning stealing—has infected the minds of consumers once motivated by quality. Apparently Apple recognized that consumers care more about quantity; how else can one explain their embrace of a technology, MP3, notably worse than the already poor CD? Apparently Apple realized that there was profit in marketing to the millions of music thieves, “I get a lot ripped from BitTorrent…I do buy some stuff off iTunes if I really like the music or want better quality or can’t find it on BitTorrent.” (12)

The contagion of theft is indirectly explored in “Encountering Mary,” by Angela K. Martin and Sandra Kryst, as they discuss the concept of “sympathetic magic.” They describe how “producing an effigy of an individual will allow one to harm that individual through abuse of her or his representation.” (13) MP3’s are abused representations, effigies harmed both by the audio torture of lossy compression, and their frequent black magic acquisition of the negative energies of theft. This was my original dislike of the iPod, the fear that it was a tool of sympathetic black magic voodoo, another anti-artist scheme, in this case one designed to harm music and musicians. None of the people I interviewed shared this fear. Perhaps people haven’t time for magic anymore.

I did interview one Tarot reader. This middle-aged woman was outside the demographic I expected for iPod users. I was interested in knowing how non-users felt about the iPod. I was quite surprised when she told me she had one.

It should be mentioned that Susie is not overly fond of technology; at her not exactly insistent, but easily understood request, this interview was not taped. The words that follow come from my handwritten notes. Although there are gaps in my shorthand, I believe this excerpt substantially conveys the essence of our conversation.

Susie continued, “Well, actually I do have an iPod, but I don’t even know how to turn it on. A friend’s daughter gave it me when she heard I didn’t have one. A fourteen year old girl, she felt sorry for me.” (14)

Not all fourteen year olds have enough cash, but there are many with iPods. I asked several, students of mine in an after-school Saturday English class for non-native speakers, to write essays about the iPod. This research attempt proved less interesting than most of the face-to-face interviews, I suspect primarily because the spoken interviewees were all adults. Nonetheless, some of these student answers are revealing [of both their attitudes and need for better English skills].

James wrote, “Mostly [sic] of the population can recognize an Ipod [sic] when they see one. One time when my teacher took out her Ipod, everyone in the class starred [sic] with shock. It was kind of weird for me because I thought many teachers didn’t want to follow the hype, or were too old to know how to use technology.” (15)

This student’s awareness that there is a faddish aspect to the iPod is astute. His mapping of the limited technical abilities of older generations also often proves true.

Richard, another English student, may have commented further on the generational divide when he wrote, “My dad has a mini one which he rarely uses. I think iPods are sometimes exaggerated because, why would someone want over 1000 songs when they might not listen to it that much?” (16)

That quantity could be a negative was also revealed by an adult owner, “My screen broke a couple months ago. I can still play music, but I can’t tell what songs it’s gonna be. I actually listen to the radio more. I have so much music my roommate loaded. But I get more info off KPOO and KPFA.” (17)

As Anthony, one of my student essayists added, “It…has many uses. I own an iPod Video…iPods are great because they allow you to do many things. iPods are mainly for listening to music, but there are other features…” (18) Among those many additional uses is podcasting, the new publishing paradigm of converting spoken material into MP3 form so it can be quickly distributed to the mass of iPod (and Internet) users.

On one inbound bus ride I sat directly behind a woman who tightly clutched her pink iPod Nano in the same hand as her cellphone, and held both protectively atop her purse. Across the iPod’s screen, occasionally illuminated by presumably accidental jostling of the machine’s surface, scrolled the text, “World Radio, French News.” After ten minutes or so this unwitting research subject disconnected her ears, put away the iPod, and in a move I at first thought wholly out of place for any iPod user, retrieved a book from her bag. A still unwrinkled airplane boarding pass was her bookmark. Over her shoulder I could read a few lines, “shivering in the daylight, looking for his shirt,” and, “So I said yes to Thomas Clinton, and later thought I had said yes to God.” I never learned the title of her book. I believe it was the typical soft-port romance novel available everywhere, especially at airports. That the iPod facilitated this woman’s rapid movement from international news podcast to personal entertainment is further explanation for this product’s popularity. As I recorded my invasion of her personal space, I noticed one other woman look at me, perhaps wondering what I was writing; I feared she might have detected my spying. For I was a spy, and I began to realize how often I engage in stealing looks and lusts across that gendered space of everywhere displayed womanhood that males so often consider their rightful visual possession. No wonder more women choose the defensive space of the iPod string tie.

My research did not lessen my fears about the decreasing perceived worth of music, the continuing willingness of people to be faddish members of a pod, or the increasing acceptance of the felony of theft. I found no greater love for digital technology, nor any greater hope for society’s future. It didn’t surprise me that there was both a perceived and actual generational divide between users and non-users, or that for many the iPod is more about status than function. But I was surprised to learn that women might be the majority of iPod users, and that many of them might consider the iPod a defensive garment. The increasing simulation of cultural space often chosen as mere prophylactic against the place contagion modern bodies must endure may not be the fairest condemnation of the iPod. Recordings are almost always a simulation of a former reality, yet this does not make them or their analogues in photography, painting, sculpture or other pursuits invalid. Information is necessary, and mimetic information, the iPod’s primary production, is still valuable. But where will we play? Where will we live? Where will we place our informed selves? The fear is not so much that our bodies might be snatched or virtualized, or our heritage lost or reappropriated, as it is simply our trackless plunge toward an increasingly bleak prognosis, the looming lack of any desirable future space within which to place ourselves.



1. Don Siegel, director, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, (1956) This movie includes Betty’s pod-people line, “They’re like huge seed pods,” which might better tie in with the concept of the danger of iPods, but is not, by itself, nearly as frightening as the opening lines of the film’s trailer, chosen here as epigraph.
2. Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, authors and editors, The Anthropology of Space and Place, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.; 2006) p. 2.
3. Ibid. p. 3.
4. Ibid. p. 3.
5. To my knowledge, the iPod, as a collective term does not yet apply. I mean this as a reference to my epigraph.
6. Robin Balliger was overheard telling this anecdote on May 8, 2007.
7. Lee Tamahor, director, Once Were Warriors, (1995).
8. The somewhat sexist term “coed” was deliberately chosen to underscore the point of the interviewee’s story, that she despised being sexually objectified.
9. Kate, SFAI student interviewed on campus. (Interviewed May 1, 2007).
10. The statistical counts indicating that the majority of iPod users are women were not rigorously obtained and are not claimed as definitive. They are the result of three mentally counted morning walks from Bush and Sansome to Columbus and Chestnut.
11. In Simon Leung and Marita Sturken’s article, “Displaced Bodies in Residual Spaces,” excerpted from Public Culture, (Duke University Press: 2005), the term “catachrestic” is applied to the state-engineered spatial appropriation technique that named the Vietnam War’s famed surfing location, China Beach. War is not particularly relevant to iPod useage, but the authors’ discussion of the concept of seemingly inappropriate word coinage provides interesting background to the etymology of “iPod.”
12. Kate, SFAI student interviewed on campus. (Interviewed May 1, 2007).
13. Angela K. Martin and Sandra Kryst, “Encountering Mary,” from Places Through the Body, (Routledge Chapman & Hall; 1998) p. 210.
14. Suzie the Tarot reader. (Interview conducted, April 26, 2007).
15. James, eighth grade student of Monica Learning Center. (Essay written in-class, April 21, 2007).
16. Richard, eighth grade student of Monica Learning Center. (Essay written in-class, April 21, 2007).
17. Jen, SFAI student interviewed on “T” line. (Interviewed May 2, 2007).
18. Anthony, eighth grade student of Monica Learning Center. (Essay written in-class, April 21, 2007).