More and More (Media)tion

As if we needed even more technology to mediate the world for us, someone has come up with the ambient walkman. Basically, the product is a pair of headphones which sample ambient noise and turn it into some form of music. Its creator prefers to style it "The Ambient Addition," which frankly I find insufferable. The idea that we need even more mediation seems ridiculous to me. I suppose that the technology represents a somewhat cool achievement, but I'm at a loss to understand why anyone would want to listen to an approximation of music created by the birds, the bees, and those jackhammers down the street (although I suppose that combination would be pretty wild).

The article begins with the following statement: "The popularity of the iPod has given new urgency to an old criticism of the portable music player: namely, that it isolates the listener by tuning out the world around him. As one response to this problem, Noah Vawter, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has created a pair of headphones that tunes the listener back in." My question is, how exactly does a pair of headphones that mediates and manipulates the sound around us "tune us back in?" If the issue is being isolated from the world around us, why not just take the headphones off? And who says that bein isolated from what's around us is necessarily always a bad thing? Have we really gotten to the point where people need some kind of mediation to walk down the street? Are the sounds of the real world really that scary? What I find interesting and somewhat disturbing about the article is that it assumes that some form of mediation is an inevitable condition. And given what's posited by all those theories of mediation that we read, they might just be right. But I still maintain that we ought to be able to walk to class, to the store, or wherever else without having a device strapped to our heads that inteprets the world for us. What's so wrong with that?