It both embodied the era’s individualism and exacerbated it. In a sense, the Walkman was the perfect fit for the 80s - the decade of “greed is good” and Reagan and Thatcher. “Play your Walkman and you might as well shout ‘Everybody just piss off!’” You close your eyes and you could be anywhere.” As he recognized, that liberation could be alienating to others. “It signals a desire to cut yourself off from the rest of the world at the touch of a button. “The experience of listening to your Walkman is intensely insular,” he wrote. Vince Jackson, writing in the British magazine Touch, pondered the resulting dynamic. “In seeking a sort of emotional climate control wherever we go, are we not simply proving anew our growing determination not to deal with one another?” he wrote.Įven some Walkman enthusiasts acknowledged that this dimension was part of the device’s appeal. In the Chicago Tribune, writer Rick Horowitz worried about the social and psychological implications of the Walkman craze. At the same time, as listeners roamed the streets in their sound bubbles, they were ignoring other people, opting out, to some extent, of shared space.
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