The Sony Walkman Ushered In An Age Of Gadgetry

Today, those original Walkman portable stereos are buried in landfills around the globe, leaking their particular stew of toxic compounds into water tables right alongside the obsolete cassette tapes they played. And for a younger generation that has practiced its own brand of autism chic via digital devices like the iPod, it may seem like the Walkman is a quaint relic of the analog dark ages.

Yet it was the Walkman, more than any other gadget, that ushered in an era wherein the enjoyment of music and other media has shifted from being a mostly social activity to a mostly personal one. The other popular music delivery vehicle of the time, the boom box, was essentially a technological dead-end, notwithstanding the increasingly rare beat-bumping hoopty that rolls by. The Walkman, by contrast, spawned the ubiquitous smartphones, MP3 players and Bluetooth headsets of today.

The portable transistor radio preceded it, but it was the Walkman that took the burgeoning cultural iconography of cross-generational misunderstanding that grew out of the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, and updated it with a technological motif that turned the conflict on its head. The popular culture's grumpy-old-man archetype went from shouting at cavorting teens to stop having so much fun, to ripping the headphones off sullen ones and begging them to start.

The Walkman's success might also be an important marker in humankind's march toward a biological merging with machines, an evolutionary upheaval that futurologists like Ray Kurzweil believe is imminent. Sony's gadget made it socially acceptable to putter around with electronically transmitted voices rattling around in one's head -- paving the way for the normalization of even odder behavior (think hands-free phones) and, theoretically, for the cybernetic implants that will turn us all into self-contained digital islands of trans-human nanoflesh.

As the saying goes, we've got that going for us, which is nice. Cheers, Sony!