iPod iBorg

When I bought my iPod over a year ago, the first time I used it in public during my lunch time walk abouts, it felt like I’d gone backwards in time. During my college years I would often go on walks around Hyde Park and along the lake shore with my portable cassette player and whatever cheap headphones I had at the time. It was fun to overlay my own soundtrack on the world around me. So experiencing this with my iPod was like revisiting my youth, not that my youth is all gone yet!

This is all good fun, but could there be more to it? Markus Giesler, an assistant professor of marketing at York University in Toronto seems to think so. He thinks that iPods are transforming their users into cyborgs. In his view, a cyborg is someone who uses a variety of technologies and is highly connected. Well that certainly makes me guilty. Keeping the pod fed has led me to make a few computer upgrades for convenience and has increased my desire for convergent devices that embody multiple functions. My poor Palm IIIe finds itself left out in the cold as my cell phone, tiny USB drive, and iPod usurp much of its functionality. While I have no desire to take the next step and make these devices a part of my body, I’m sure that given a chance, many people are going to do just that in the coming years.

Resistance is futile. You too will be assimilated, to the tune of JPop anime soundtracks!