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THE GREAT WALKMAN PANIC OF THE 1980s
Surrendering an entire sense—sight, for instance—to wearable technology has, in recent years, caused strong negative responses: from Google Glass to Oculus Rift and Apple Vision Pro. How scary! How isolating! How dystopian! Remember?
Well, it turns out, a long time ago, most of us already surrendered another sense—our hearing—to wearable technology: think, audio headphone. We don them in public without a second thought, and without shame or ridicule, but it wasn’t always like this.
In the 1980s Sony’s Walkman™--a product which made headphones small and light enough for everyday use—was as revolutionary and controversial as more recent vision-based headsets, and it elicited similarly strong responses.
As the device began to infiltrate public life, the reactions that it caused ranged from laughter to genuine moral panic. People suddenly had the power to change and add to their reality and partially to escape the real one we all share. What could it mean for human civilization?
The Walkman, critics claimed, was more than just music to one's ears; it was a tool to destroy social bonds and to cause intellectual stunting. A danger on the roads, an enemy to learning and a threat to health.
Thomas
Lipscomb, chief of the Center
for the Digital Future,
compared the Walkman
to the feel-good drug "soma," in Aldous Huxley's novel
Brave
New World,
creating, as Lipscomb put it,
"an
airtight bubble of sound" that was nothing but a "sensory
depressant."
But the New Jersey township of Woodbridge went a step further, forbidding not just driving or biking but even crossing the street while listening to a Walkman's melodies. The price for breaking this prohibition? A potential two-week stay in jail and a fine. The law made national and international news.
The day the law was put into effect, Oscar Gross, a retiree from a neighboring town, was spurred into action. Burning with indignation, he approached Police Sergeant Lou Monzo, purposefully put on his headphones, and casually walked across the street.
The outcome of this small act of civil disobedience? Gross became the first person legally punished for wearing headphones, even though they were not plugged into anything!
Unaffected, he boldly stated in an interview, "I am prepared to go to jail for 15 days just to prove a point." He ended up being interviewed on national TV shows.
However, to his disappointment, he was not sent to jail. After the judge imposed a USD$50 fine, which was later suspended, a frustrated Gross expressed to a journalist, "The judge did not even give me the opportunity to say that I was willing to serve time in jail."
Oscar’s son says his father was preparing to take the case all the way to the US Supreme Court but backed out after someone was killed crossing the street while wearing a Walkman.
This kind of tragic anecdote is the inevitable price of freedom but also an inspiration for future tech improvements. Today, four decades later, headphones have evolved to the point where they safely let traffic sound in and cause no riots.
However, just wait until the Luddites consider the dangers of the upcoming Apple headset—their brains may explode! And, Woodbridge, New Jersey, may want to update the anti-tech ordinances from the 1980s.
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