The Anti-Social iPod?

Andrew Sullivan (from the Daily Dish) has an op-ed in the Sunday Times of London, titled Society is Dead, We Have Retreated Into the iWorld. It's a rant against what he views as the anti-socializing effects of the iPod MP3 music player. Sullivan thinks that iPod owners "walk around the world like hermit crabs with our isolation surgically attached."

That's hardly the case. I would wager that more spontaneous conversations, and flirtations, have begun about iPods and what their owners are listening to than about anything since blotter acid in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. More to the point, the world is a great place when it has a soundtrack. It makes people smile, and smiles make for pleasant social interactions. If you ask me -- and Andrew hasn't, but I will tell him anyway -- it's the folks who are tethered to their wireless headsets and talk on cell phones while walking down the street who are really anti-social. A decade ago that behavior (mumbling to one's self in public) would have been regarded as delusional or schizophrenic. Maybe it still should be!

 Posted by glenn