The Walkman cassette player turned 40 this year, leading to a retrospective on the part of Smithsonian. While an innovation at the time, the Walkman is a simple single function device: it only plays cassette tapes. As such, it might strike some as odd that the same prophecies of technological doom shouted today were shouted back in the heyday of the Walkman.
While lacking the ability to record, the Walkman was often used to play mixtapes, and these were presented as a dire threat to the music industry. While many truly horrible mixtapes were mixed, the industry survived. When the next musical tech innovation came along, the cry of doom echoed again in the land. And again, and again. And yet the day the music died has yet to come to pass. As such, it is sensible to heed the lesson of the Walkman: dire predictions of doom should be made more cautiously, and it should not be assumed that innovation is always a death knell. That said, technology can be a terrible swift sword—the challenge is sorting out what it slays and what it spares.
The Walkman was also used a symbol to engage in insulting criticism of the youth; Der Spiegel called it “A technology for a generation with nothing left to say.” Oddly enough, that generation has had a lot to say; the prophecy of silence did not come true. This view will sound quite familiar to those who have heard the bashing of millennials using smartphones and tablets as the focus of the attack; presumably the next terrible tech is in the labs, waiting to become the symbol of how terrible the youth of the future will be. Regardless of the technology, the youth are always presented as the worst generation and lacking in the virtues that their elders were said to have possessed. Of course, if every generation of youth were as terrible as claimed, the elders would be devoid of virtues—for today’s elders are yesterday’s youth. Before claiming that the youth of today are terrible, think back on what your elders said of you. Perhaps you were one of those terrible youths with a Walkman blasting their brains.
As should be expected, the Walkman was also accused of having brain rotting properties. Those who are old enough or interested in history will recall the dire prediction that TV would rot the minds of children. Alan Bloom, the philosopher of doom and gloom, wrote in The Closing of the American Mind about a Walkman defiled youth, “a pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms.” He predicted that “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say.” Having grown up during the height of the Walkman era, I can assure readers that the Walkman did not have this effect. In addition to people listening to the classics on tapes, many people read them while listening to their Walkman, just as people had long read with music playing in the background over their Victrola, Gramophone, or stereo. Today the prediction is that the youth will stare mindlessly into screens, swiping rather than throbbing. But the truth is that the youth do read the classics on screens (and on paper) and that the dire predictions will no more come true now than they have in the past.
On this anniversary of the Walkman, it is worth considering there is a law governing the emergence of new entertainment technology and societal response. It is created, dire predictions are made, it becomes a symbol to use in lazy insults and then another generation is born, and a new technology emerges. Then the process repeats itself. The Walkman users were judged, now they are the judges. The smartphone kids will grow up to judge their kids, making dire predictions about whatever they think is rotting their brains.
It is certainly worth considering that a technology will be developed that will fulfil these prophecies of doom—that really does degrade, corrupt and isolate the youth. But until then, the cycle will continue.
You’re covering a lot of ground with a broad brush here.
It might be appropriate to replace the word “Doom” with “Change”. In this way we can put the change in context based on who might be helped or harmed by the change, and thus make a better analysis.
With regard to the music industry, I don’t think anyone was really worried about the music dying – only the profit structure of the music production companies, and the ability of musicians to make the money they deserve for their creative efforts.
The Walkman, in and of itself, represented no threat to the music industry. As you say, it was just a playback device. Absent any other technological support, it would have simply done what it was designed to do – provide an inexpensive incentive for people to buy more commercially produced tapes.
Of course, in combination with the sophisticated pro-sumer reel-to-reel or double cassette decks available for home stereo systems, there definitely was an expansion of the technology that bypassed the big recording studios. But the threat to the existing business model was minimal. The true threat was to the big studios being able to capitalize on the new business.
The Walkman itself wasn’t the threat – it was the demand of consumers to be able to buy the music they wanted without having to pay for a “B-Side”. The technology to accomplish this would never have been a threat either, if the music industry had not been so complacent and unwilling to adapt.
Even so, as sophisticated as these analog recordings were, the ability to mass produce at a level that would actually compete with the music industry was still well out of reach. Even the digital recording capabilities – “ripping” digital content from CD’s and DVD’s was pretty small change.
One might make the case that those who predicted the threat to the music industry were able to see beyond the Walkman all the way to Napster and Limewire – which definitely threatened the status quo of the industry. But even that level of production capability never suggested that the music would die – only that the production paradigms would shift. And shift they did. Musicians can now self-produce high quality indie singles and EP’s, and become successful without having to subject themselves to the exploitation of major labels. Consumers, via digital services like iTunes or Google Play, can purchase the individual tracks they want without having to shell out for entire albums.
Video streaming services, cell phone plans, and other industries are undergoing similar changes; it’s called “Free Market”, and it’s how consumer-centric economies develop. Times change, industries die, existing companies adapt or go out of business; forward-looking entrepreneurs produce wealth in niche markets that did not exist before.
There’s an interesting “disconnect” or irony about this that seems to be expressed mostly on the political left. The left are the most vocal – decrying how technical innovation can and will cost jobs, putting American workers out of work and tossing them onto the unemployment lines and welfare rolls. At the same time, though, the left is also the most vocal about how “Big Business” is such a threat to America – how “Big Tech” and “Big Auto”, “Big Pharma” and “Big [Fill-In-The-Blank] exploits workers and influences government. Yet in the face of so many of these game-changers, the threat is posed to THEM. They are the ones who will profit most by maintaining the status quo – they don’t need no stinkin upstarts messin’ around on their turf!
As an example, when I got into 3D production, a single seat of high end software cost $30,000, and the minimum configuration it would run on was a low-end SGI machine that started at $12,000. 3D artists had to go to work for Disney, Sony, Dreamworks … or big game companies like Blizzard. Now, a student still in school can buy a hot machine at Best Buy and “lease” software from Autodesk or Epic – and produce an indy game right in his mom’s basement. And in many cases, he won’t be charged until his sales reach a certain level.
(I had a student who, during his undergrad years, built himself a neat little render-farm that he put on a VPN; he completely bypassed the “wait your turn” policy at the University. He then offered compute cycles to his fellow students to help them render their larger projects, but ultimately turned it into a pretty tidy cash cow. He was able to consistently plow a portion of his revenue into additional RAM, GPU and CPU power along with additional render licenses – and as his client base began to grow, he ended up hiring his classmates to monitor the renders. Score one for the little guy!)
I recently saw a post on some Internet site or another that featured a couple of scanned pages from a Radio Shack catalogue from not very long ago. The pages showed digital video cameras, MP3 players, clock-radios, GPS devices, calculators, cassette decks, answering machines, telephones and telephone systems and a whole bunch of other products that were hot – along with cables and connectors and adapters that were the stock in trade for that store. And every single one of those products has been rendered obsolete by the smartphone. And Radio Shack is closing stores all over the country – but that doesn’t mean their employees are now on the breadlines. They have adapted. They’re working for cellphone companies, or Best Buy, or for companies that retrofit smart homes – or they’ve just moved into a different retail space. Ditto for the managers and executives.
But you make another point in your post – one that I think really is something that requires “deep thought”, for which there are HUGE moral, and ethical considerations that have the potential to change the world as we know it – and not necessarily in a good way.
I’ll address that in a second post.
A quick point of clarification – my student was very generous to his classmates, and did not accept a dime from them for his rendering services. He leveraged social media, 3D production blogs & forums and other free Internet resources to launch a no-cost ad campaign through which he established a substantial client base. During all of this, he made sure that he was able squeeze his classmates in for free. And those that connected with the concept and helped him out for the sake of building something cool and efficient were the ones who ultimately became part of the business.