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Are iPod Users Better People?

Boing Boing co-author and InformationWeek contributor Cory Doctorow has a review of Steven Levy's history of the iPod: The Perfect Thing. It sounds like a great book, and the iPod sure is a great product. And yet there's something creepy about some of the community of Mac and iPod enthusiasts.

Consider this passage from Cory's review, for instance, about the L-train "iPod wars" in New York, "where subway riders challenge one another to coolness battles that consist of facing off your iPod's current track against another rider's, to see who has the better taste."

Music tracks are just products, and the choice of products you buy doesn't make you a better person. You're not a better person if you live in a nicer house, you're not a better person if you drive a nicer car, and you're not a better person if you have a better MP3 player or better music on that MP3 player. It's all just stuff you bought. If you have a really wonderful collection of music on your iPod that displays your excellent musical taste, it doesn't mean anything at all, because you haven't actually done anything. You've just bought a bunch of audio files. (Or stolen them. But that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

Now if you actually created that music -- if you performed it or wrote it or produced it -- then you've accomplished something.

I have an iPod, and I like it fine. But it's just stuff that I bought. Doesn't say anything about me except that I had $400 lying around in 2004 and decided to get myself a toy.

This point may seem obvious to you, but it doesn't seem obvious to a lot of the Mac enthusiast community. Back in the 90s, journalists could count on getting reams of hate mail if they wrote an article disparaging the Mac. Actual hate mail -- even some death threats -- from people who felt insulted because somebody said bad things about a product they bought.

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