Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
I love the idea of this series, but I chose this one somewhat at random — and it was a winner for me! I’m just old enough to have used a Walkman for a while before I started using things like CDs and a minidisk player, before moving onto an iPod. I was that kid blocking out all the other kids, as a teenager, though by then it was definitely CDs/minidisk/iPod: I was the one in my own little world, and I needed it amidst all the bullying at my school — an aspect of why people might have chosen personal stereos that doesn’t quite get covered here, though the concerns about people going off into their own little world, as well as the pleasures thereof, are covered.
The author has quite the nostalgia for personal stereos, but tries to look at them critically and pick apart the nostalgia to see what they really were. In some ways, the societal reaction to them was very similar to that toward mobile phones: they were making people anti-social, they were ruining all kinds of things, they were dangerous, etc. Always funny to see that we’re the same throughout generations…
It’s a short read, and I found it worthwhile. Surprisingly touching in some ways (the story of the co-founders of Sony, both having had strokes, communicating silently and remaining friends, for instance). I was absorbed enough to read it in less than an hour, without putting it down.
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