Autonomy
The initial Walkman marketing campaign showcased the freedom it brought. The first presentation to the press involved young people riding bikes and skateboarding while listening to Walkmans. Hosokawa points to this ability to listen to music and do something else as making those experiences more pleasurable. The Walkman, he says, is the "autonomy-of-the-walking-self."
Sony's vice president in charge of audio products said that Walkman's achievement was that it "provided listeners with a personal soundtrack to their lives" (quoted in Patton). Due to this, Walkman use allows its users to make even the most boring daily activities interesting, adding a bit of personal style to everything they do.
University of Sussex Professor Michael Bull (aka Professor iPod) argues that a personal stereo changes the way its user processes the world, allowing for greater confidence and control over personal experiences in space and time. From an interview in Wired: "People like to control their environment, and the iPod is the perfect way to manage your experience. Music is the most powerful medium for thought, mood and movement control." Basically, Bull describes how music empowers the listener because of what one is now enabled to do, which is to "inhabit" the space in which they move. Controlling one's own space is the power of the Walkman effect, which then causes no dead air, giving the user more power through their music.
Read more about this topic: Walkman Effect
Famous quotes containing the word autonomy:
“A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“I’m tired of earning my own living, paying my own bills, raising my own child. I’m tired of the sound of my own voice crying out in the wilderness, raving on about equality and justice and a new social order.... Self-sufficiency is exhausting. Autonomy is lonely. It’s so hard to be a feminist if you are a woman.”
—Jane O’Reilly, U.S. feminist and humorist. The Girl I Left Behind, ch. 7 (1980)