To observe the thirtieth birthday of the Sony Walkman, BBC News Magazine persuaded a thirteen year old iPod user—reared with the coddling comforts of touchscreens and 10,000 song playlists—to trade his player in for its stark ancestor. The piece is an interesting examination of not simply the obvious changes in industrial design and device function since the late 70s, but the ease with which we’ve taken these changes for granted.
As the teen revisits (or more properly, visits for the first time) the dinosaur Walkman, his digital naïvety—the horror that the tape player would be without a shuffle function—is matched by [...]
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