THE ICONIC INTERFACE AND THE VENEER OF SIMPLICITY:MP3 players and the reconfiguration of music collecting and reproduction practices in the digital age

Abstract

Apple's iPod and MP3 players in general have risen to cultural prominence in recent years. Figures now indicate that in Britain as many as 48 per cent of 16–34 year olds own some form of MP3 player, Apple have sold nearly 60 million iPods worldwide since their launch in November 2001, and the billionth worldwide legal music download was recorded in February 2006. In this context of relative mass and escalating appropriation we are faced with a series of pressing sociological questions concerning the transformative capacities of these technologies. This paper attempts to set out some of these questions for further investigation. Here it is claimed that the MP3 player has reconfigured and recontextualized music in distinct yet interrelated ways: (1) the reconfiguration of music as a virtual (MP3) rather than a physical cultural artefact (vinyl record, tape, or CD), which has implications for music collecting/archiving; and (2) extending the work of the personal stereo, the MP3 player is recontextualizing music by moving it out across the spaces of everyday life, a process that transcends boundaries between public and private zones. The paper concentrates on the former and suggests that the reconfigurations afforded by MP3 technologies can be understood in terms of Katherine Hayles' conceptualization of ‘incorporative’ and ‘inscriptive’ practices allied with Apple's own theory of the iPod as an ‘iconic interface’ cultivating an auratic ‘veneer of simplicity’.