Unlike the 1990s, which was the decade searching for an idea, the 2000s has finally found something even better. An i-dea has been traded for an i-pod. The convergent leisure platform has triggered podcasting, i-tunes, party shuffles and nanos. As a design object, it is immaculate in its stark whiteness. The gently textured wheel scrolls through a lifetime’s soundtrack of love, loss, pain and pleasure.

Now that this object has not only entered consciousness but popular culture, it is time to think – succinctly and keenly – about the politics of the i-pod and the consequences of its permeation through our lives. It is also an apt topic for this column of Thinking Pop. This year foreshadows the ultimate digital convergence of mobile phones, mobile music and mobile organizers. Before this digitization of lifestyle, it is important that we ponder the social losses alongside the convenience of integration.

There are problems with the i-pod, and they involve how we think about the self in society. The i-pod immerses the listener in a very private world, cut away from the community-building nature of popular music history. So much of rock and roll was fired by the shared experience of rhythm, through dancing, sweating and singing. The i-pod is different, slicing the space away from the sound. It is a personal soundtrack, not a collective sonic experience.

While the Walkman also triggered a similar isolation through the mix, the shift from analogue cassettes – of a finite length – to the endless permutations of the party shuffle has meant that the digitized soundtrack can be a perpetual companion through life without changing sides of a tape or inserting a new disc.

I started to realize the consequences of this transformation in November last year when I was traveling through England, moving between the south east of the country and London. The commuters’ behaviour was startling. While it was a special trip for me, it was a daily grind for these travellers. Most were locked in the steel shell of the train for two hours a day to get to work, and another two hours to return home. Almost all were wearing i-pods. I was struck by their faces – starring into space outside of the train’s window. Locked in the routine of work, locked into their party shuffle, they were not thinking about how hours of their lives were being lost each day. They were not thinking about alternative ways that their life could be organized. Instead, as an individual, they suffered through a bizarre (post)work ritual, facilitated – or medicated – by their i-pod.

My disquiet – of seeing anamatrons traveling through the post-Fordist economic matrix – moved from the working environment to leisure during my New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2005. I always go to the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle. They have a buffet. They have dancing. The crowd is happy, in a giggly post-five house wines kind of way. This year, in the build up to 2006, I was sitting at a table with three couples. I was having a great chat with Ron and Heather about football, cricket and soccer. They were lovely people, enjoying the music, drinks and food. They were great company.

The other two couples were simply strange. They did not converse with other members of the table. They had come from England but seemed disinterested in the place to which they had travelled. Although three different white wines, three different red wines and two distinct beers were freely served as part of the restaurant package – certainly enough to put most people on the floor – the English couples chose to buy gin and tonics all night rather than drink the free wine. When midnight came, the entire crowd was dancing – happy in the shared analogue moment. When I looked back from the dance floor to my table, I saw the two couples not only sitting down, but each person was sending text messages from their phone. They were not even talking to each other, let alone the other people at the party.

This moment embodied the problems and tragedies of this lifestyle technology, of which the i-pod is the icon. These platforms create a displacement economy, desiring more than we have, needing a greater range of goods than is available, and endlessly mortgaging the present for a future that will never happen. Text messaging captures this problem. Instead of looking up and living in the analogue environment of a real New Year celebration, too many of us are looking down and sending digital nonsense to other people, distracting them from their own context.

For many of us who teach for a living, we are managing the consequences of this lifestyle technology in our classrooms. Through the semester, I have been spending time watching these young consumers working (with) their pods and phones. They arrive into lecture theatres with their ear phones in place, (thankfully) removing them for the lecture, and then slotting them straight back into their skull at the end of the session. They do not talk to other students and are isolated in their scholarship. While this isolation worries me, I have more immediate problems. It has been a battle of wills to ensure that they turn their (bloody) phone off, not merely switching it to vibrate, and disconnect their eyes from the screen. There is a rationale for my rage. I want them to live in their present, rather than being dragged into displaced digi-leisure.

The immersion of these students in their digi-scape has created a fascinating sociological effect. We have a whole generation that looks down to their phones and is deaf to the analogue sounds in their environment. This is a soundscape when connectivity means more than concentration. As an outsider to this culture, I remain fascinated by the political and social cost of this mediation through sound and screen. What are the consequences to building communities and consciousness, let alone knowledge and social justice, by living in an individualized, atomized, customized, consumerist world?

Every technological change triggers a luddite fear for the end of society. Even the word technology is frightening to many. It suggests that there is an object that is difficult to use, advanced and – most importantly – new. Only really talented and smart people know how to use technology. But then, over time, the object, application or platform is used by more people. The threat and fear subsides and it immerses itself into social life and social practices. For example, think about the toaster. When we make breakfast in the morning, we rarely think, as we ping the bread into the shiny metallic object in the kitchen, “wow, I am now using technology to assemble my breakfast.” The reason we have naturalized the toaster as part of our life, rather than labelling it as frightening technology, is because we have embedded the toaster in our social practices.

The difficulty is that empowered institutions (the workplace, schools and universities) become fixated on particular technological applications, and undermine the skills and literacies involved in using others. We have all seen a group of Baby Boomer men who are w-a-a-y too impressed by their PowerPoint slides. The setting up of the projector has become a bizarre new masculine masturbatory ritual. Such arbitrary fixations and choices has meant that technology in the home becomes less complex (and important) than technology in the workplace.

In the last year, with the leisurfication of technology and the entry of Google into popular culture, ‘high technology’ has become accessible and less threatening. The i-pod and mobile phones have domesticated digitization, and changed the role and function of the World Wide Web and the Internet. The Toaster Theory prevails. Digitization has been situated into our social lives. The digital ‘revolution’ is now part of a lifestyle. Popular music was incredibly important to this history of lifestyle technology. In fact, the speed at which digitization has become a lifestyle is due to mobile phone ring tones, MP3 players generally and the i-pod in particular.

Music is not only mobile again through these changes, facilitated by digital compression, but it is once more intimately intertwined with identity. The question for educators is how this distraction from the analogue present will transform how we think about reading, writing and thinking. For my students this year, they find it incredibly difficult to concentrate long enough to read required course material. It is not necessarily their fault. The institutions around them are dismissive of difficult ideas and intense and challenging interpretations. If a song is boring, then the i-pod scrolls through it. If a person is boring, then their text message can be deleted. The idea of forging through difficult material, developing new skills and literacies that may challenge the truths of our lives rather than facilitating sonic satiation, is outside their experience. They are trying to read and learn, but the losses of this lifestyle capitalism are yet to be reconciled with the expectations of scholarship.

During the last week, there was a moment when the gulf in expectations between the digitally convergent lifestyle of Generation Y and the analogue integration of Generation X jutted from a tutorial. We were discussing changing theories of literacy. Kate, an effervescent and funny young woman, asked me a serious question about how much reading is required at university. I repeated what my first history Professor told me in the late 1980s: reading eight books a week should be standard. I have maintained that level every week of my life since that first course. Poor Kate looked at me – stunned and silent. Then she asked, “do you read the same book over and over again, or different ones?” She then confirmed how often she re-read her Harry Potter novels.