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The War on the Walkman
The Sony Walkman is now iconic of the 1980s, eliciting nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music, rather than renting it.
Cultural critic Allan Bloom deemed the Walkman"a nonstop... masturbational fantasy” in his 1987 book ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ Neo-Luddite John Zerzan saw the Walkman as part of a modern trend that encouraged a"protective sort of withdrawal from social connections" and Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug "soma," from Huxley's Brave New World, creating, as he put it,"an airtight bubble of sound" that was nothing but a"sensory depressant." The Walkman, critics claimed, was more than just music to one's ears; it was a tool of societal disconnect and for government officials and law enforcement a danger on the roads, because it limited the hearing of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. 30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers
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