They cause severe hearing problems and they’re rumored not to last, but I have no real problem with that. Anyone who wants to really rock has already made the decision to forsake some of their audio-sense, and what corporation actually builds their popular goods to last, anyway? A much bigger thing to worry about the iPods is the fact that they turn people into zombies.

Last year I thought everyone had an iPod but me. Clearly, I was wrong - so many people were converted to the revolution this Christmas, coming back from the break with gleaming new white/chrome boxes. Those who had no iPods got them and many with iPods already got an updated version - thinner, brighter, and better than ever. The little white plugs, however, look the same - and the expressions on the faces of the plugged do as well.

My original beef with the iPods was that listeners didn’t get the glory of an album cover-art or liner notes, but this has mostly been dispelled by the bigger, high-definition, color screens the new iPods have, capable of displaying any picture file and showing the album cover next to the song while it’s playing. But anyone who uses that as a pro-iPod argument has missed the point - I may be getting overly-romantic here, but I think there is something a lot more enjoyable to actually holding the thing (vinyl or plastic) in your hands, touching it and looking at it and then hearing the music it contains being read off (by needle or laser) through speakers and into the air… as opposed to “files” stored in a little white box, even with the art reproduced on a tiny glowing screen. I know I’m one of the few who think this way, but I don’t even know what exactly a “file” is. A bit of data. One’s and zero’s. That’s not really music, is it?

I guess it is- it makes sounds, all right. Music is music and if you’re not a sentimental teenage writer like myself, you probably don’t care about grooves on a disc vs. digital data, which is fine. The thing that really bothers me now is seeing everyone with those thin white chords coming out of their ears. No matter if I’m on the bus, in the halls at school, or on the streets, I see the people of my generation literally plugged in to these things- zoned out and alone, with indifferent faces, free to be able to ignore anyone they want. Groups of friends roam around together, but they don’t talk or even look at each other because they’re all plugged in!

Life is here to be lived, and there is a world to do it in. It seems like every other time I’m on a bus, some crazy hobo or old lady nurse or ex-commie starts up a conversation with me about something random, and they always have some weird story to tell. Anyone with little white earplugs misses out on that every day. Then of course, there’s the simple fact of existence - seeing the blue world, smelling the odors of the streets (good and bad), hearing the juxtaposed conversations of the half-a-million people of this city… I know for a fact you won’t dig all that as much as you could if you have a song playing through tinny-sounding speakers into your head.

As much as I love music, I’m starting to think it has its places, those being: on a stage, on a home stereo, in movies, live on the streets. Not in little white boxes. On Apple’s iPod website, there is a colorful digitized image of a silhouetted woman dancing, a picture that could have come straight from the cover of a Harlem Renaissance book, except for those tiny white plugs. On it is written: “Witness the evolution of the revolution. Which iPod are you?” I only worry this revolution will lead to kids who are plugged in and zoned out.