Perils of Poddery Marcus Berkmann h, to be an Early
Adopter. They are the marketing man's friends. Early Adopters buy only the latest thing, they are up to the minute, maybe even up to the second, these crazed opinion-formers whose reckless compulsion to spend all their money on rubbish keeps the global economy ticking over. You can't compete with an Early Adopter, and who would want to? Myself, I am a Late Adopter. I don't own a mobile phone, I can't drive and I only acquired a DVD player last Christmas. (And didn't plug it in for six weeks.) In July it was my birthday. What did I want? An iPod, of course. So ubiquitous are these splendid little slivers of technology that it's now possible to flaunt one in certain parts of London without being mugged. I had never seen the need to own one before, and now I have had it for a month I can't remember how I lived without it. This is the tragedy of the Late Adopter. We are the sort of people who go around saying `Email's rather useful, isn't it?' and 'Have you tasted some of those wines coming from the New World? They're really not bad at all.' Fortunately, being the last man in Europe to get an iPod allows all your friends to give you the crucial advice you'd never receive if you were the first man in Europe to get one. 'Don't download all your CDs!' said about three of them, but I was never going to anyway. Who can be bothered? 'Don't put any Radiohead on it! You'll never play it!' Strange one, that. I wanted the Pod specifically to store all those single tracks you love off albums you don't really like at all. To take an example at random, Radiohead's The Bends has been sitting on a shelf for more than a decade, played only when there's nothing else. Yes, I accept that it's a classic album and a towering achievement and so forth, but I really only like 'Fake Plastic Trees' and, at a pinch, 'Street Spirit' — both just transferred to the beloved Pod, while the CD is sent to its new home, our elegantly appointed leaky loft. 'Take them all to Oxfam!' sobs my girlfriend, but obviously that's one step too far.
Much of this, of course, is mere displacement activity. My friend Simon, who is desperately short of money, just bought himself a top-of-the-range iPod and has been assiduously downloading video footage of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore when really he should be doing some work, or almost anything else. But for those of us who fly the flag for anal-retentiveness, people whose CDs are in alphabetical order by artist, and whose A-format paperbacks may conceivably be on different shelves from their B-format paperbacks, this is just a wonderful new way of arranging and sorting things. It is possible that my criteria for inclusion on the iPod are currently a little too strict. Having thought of nothing else all month, I still have only 56 tracks on there. But I came up with another one this morning, so that's all right.
It's just important to recognise the dangers, and here's the enormous benefit of being a Late Adopter. The Word's Andrew Harrison wrote a spendid piece a few months ago bemoaning the impact of five years' iPoddery on his love of music. Listening to all his favourite tracks over and over again had gradually removed them from their original context, had stripped them of the reasons he liked them in the first place. 'Always on My Mind' by the Pet Shop Boys had, for years, evoked the great gale of 1988 on the steps of Leeds University Library, for reasons unexplained. But now all it evokes for him is itself. It's the same reason, I suspect, that no one listens only to greatest hits albums. You need the ebb and flow of the traditional 10-track 40-minute album; in fact, you need to listen to songs that you don't like as much as others. Perhaps I should put all the rest of The Bends on the iPod as well, as a necessary corrective to enjoyment. Alternatively, perhaps we should all occasionally swap iPods with friends whose taste we loathe. Or, at the very least, put a record on in the oldfashioned way.
Next, I might think about buying a dishwasher. I hear they're quite useful, too.
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