The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it.
“At the same time, modes of listening seem to be moving toward the (apparent) opposite of micro-differentiation: a total pluralism of taste. This has become the most celebrated feature of the iPod era. “I have seen the future,” Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 2004, “and it is called the Shuffle—the setting on the iPod that skips randomly from one track to another.” Here the iPod, or the digitization of musical life it represents, promises emancipation from questions of taste. Differences in what people listen to, in a Shuffled world, may have less and less to do with social class and purchasing power. Or, better yet, taste won’t correlate to class distinction: The absence of taste will. As certain foodies score points by having eaten everything—blowfish, yak milk tea, haggis, hot dogs—so the person who knows and likes all music achieves a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness.”
