Camelopard, I'll have to disagree there. At the very least, the idea that it's only a small increase might as well be used for the horse-car analogy. After all, both a horse and a car can be used to get a person from one point to another without having to walk. The difference is the car does it faster.
That must be why we've built so many roads, and parking lots, and gas stations, and other infrastructure to accommodate automobiles: because they're not all that different from horses.
Come on. Be serious--and that goes for your parrot,
sidious168, as well. If you're going to use analogies, try to use them seriously.
The difference between a horse and a car is both profound and essential--far more profound and essential, even, than the difference between riding a horse and walking.
The transition from mechanical to electro-chemical energy...
...that is to say,the transition from muscle-, water-, and wind-power to coal, oil, and electricity...
...is nothing less than the transition from pre-industrial to industrial civilization. For good or ill, it marks one of the most important epochs in the history of civilization, the history of humanity, and the history of the world.
By comparison, the transition from the Walkman to the iPod is trivial to the point of ridiculousness.
An iPod has greater storage capacity and is more mobile (both in the sense that it is smaller and because you don't have to carry around more than one cassette if you want to change to another band). It also allows you to access a song from the beginning on the first try with a click of a button (after you find the song). Rewinding and fast-forwarding is something I used to do with a walkman, but it isn't close to as convenient (I'd argue that portable CD players are slightly more convenient in this regard, but it's balanced out by the bulk and the fact that they had a tendency to skip).
I've already addressed all of these points. IPods are good--that's why I bought one. But they're not as good as they're hyped up to be. See my post above.
What's more, the MP3 player represents a mere incremental advance over its predecessors--and there is no way that this incremental advance can compare with the invention of a personal recorded-music player (let alone the invention of the automobile).
Anyone who thinks otherwise is suffering from historical myopia, and needs the intellectual equivalent of corrective lenses
The invention of the Walkman was a key event in the cultural transition from classical modernity to late modernity, or post-modernity, or whatever you want to call our present condition. It broke finally with the classically-modern model of broadcast mass entertainment, which had reached its ultimate expression in the transistor radio.
SF author and cultural critic Bruce Sterling saw this clearly more than twenty years ago, even if other people did not. In his introduction to
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, published in 1986, he wrote:
Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, he Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.
Emphasis added.
The difference between a Walkman and an iPod is comparable to the difference between, say, a Springfield 1903 rifle and today's M4 carbine.
The M4 may have a larger magazine, and a collapsible buttstock, and pistol grips, and more sophisticated sights, and select-fire capability.
But those improvements are all just incremental. In essence, rifles haven't changed much in the past hundred years--and the Springfield is still a better weapon, under certain circumstances, than its high-tech successor. The real paradigm shift in firearms design came in the late 19th century--along with so many other key inventions of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, like the automobile--or for that matter, the phonograph.
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