They neither strike up conversation on the street, nor heed the blaring horns of oncoming cars – their insular little words are corked by tiny white headphones. This is the dawn of the white plague.
Introduced in 2001, the iPod revolutionized the way Americans listened to songs, making the product instantly popular with music and technology-savvy crowds. Four years and 20 million iPods later, the white rectangular mp3 player has skyrocketed out of its original niche and into the hearts and homes of countless Americans. The effect has been so staggering that it has crushed old stereotypes and created a new, white-ear-phoned culture.
This is a new culture in which supermodels, rap stars and socialites alike wear their designer hard drives on their hips, as everyone else frantically saves up their pennies to follow suit.
Even the most devout disciples of the iPod’s massive storage drive can’t help but embrace its fashion cachet.
College of General Studies sophomore Novelette Brown, for instance, says she’s obsessed with her music and listens to her iPod nearly every single minute of every single day.
“I don’t consider it part of my fashion,” she says. “Part of my arm, part of my leg, but not part of my fashion!”
Brown insists it’s all about the music – until you try to take her trendy white headphones away.
Brown explains that she owns a pair of black wraparound headphones for when she sleeps at night, but keeps the instantly recognizable standard-issued white ones for walking around campus.
“I wouldn’t dare wear the black ones” out in public, she says, explaining that it’s the fashion equivalent of wearing one red shoe and one blue shoe. “When I wear my iPod, I want to be 100 percent Apple.”
Though emulated by countless others, Brown’s allegiance to a computer company’s fashion formula seems a bit awry. One wouldn’t dare paint Gateway cow spots on his shirts in order to start a trend any more than they would flaunt a pocket protector to show off his spotless shirts.
But herein the absurdity lays the crux of Apple’s success: the iPod is so much more than a revolutionary piece of hardware. It is fashion and function, technology and style: 60 GB of social status in a tiny white hard drive.
Sure, there are other mp3 players that do the same job as the iPod, often at a similar or lesser price. But this is a trend, not just a toy. For roughly $200-$400, one not only buys space for every conceivable music file he will ever listen to in his entire life, he buys an “it factor” – a visible allegiance to the new white style.
Others may try to avoid the trend factor by throwing out their white earbuds, as College of Arts Science freshman Mike Jones has done – but even regular headphones can’t mask the status attached to his silver mini iPod, nor the glazed look he gets in his eyes as he bobs his head to his zillions of tunes.
In short, the iPod is more than the sum of its function and its style: It’s an attitude, an icon and a way of life that beckons us to walk past our friends on the way to class so we can continue listening to our mile-long playlist, and encourages us to swagger through heavy traffic on the street, ensuring us that if our music never has to stop, then neither do we.
As Katherine Tarpley, a CAS senior, puts it, “The Apple people have created this image that for $200 we can attain.”
Whether or not one actually does attain the white-hot image of cool is not really the point. After all, even if someone were to tell us that we all looked stupid lusting after our iPods, dressing them up in designer protective wear and slowly slinking away from public life, we’d be too busy listening to them to hear him anyway.
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