"Giving up my iPod for a Walkman," by Scott Campbell (2009)

What a cute article and an interesting experiment! In the article, "Giving up my iPod for a Walkman," which appeared in BBC News Magazine, 13-year-old Scott Campbell was up to the experiment of trading in his iPod for a Walkman for a week! Being born in the 1980’s, I’ve never seen the original Walkman – it actually looks like the “grandfather of the mp3 player (Campbell 2).” According to Campbell, it’s the size of a small book with “clunky buttons (1).” Also, since it can only play one cassette at a time, you have to take into consideration the additional hauling around of the carrying case for additional cassettes, which one commenter fondly recalls toting around.

Aside from not being aesthetically pleasing and much larger than today’s mp3 players, Campbell mentions a few other cons of the Walkman – the sound quality and the lack of a true shuffle feature. He explains that when listening to the Walkman he hears “warbly” sounds (2). Also, since there is not shuffle feature, he has to rely on the rewind and fast forward buttons to skip to different tracks within the tape. He later learns from his father, however, that this practice can destroy tapes.

One pro of the Walkman is that it has two headphone sockets, which allows two people to listen to it simultaneously; a special adapter is necessary to do this on an iPod (3). But, he failed to mention that you could put the iPod on a docking station, and numerous people could listen to it at once.

It’s interesting that as I write my reaction to this article, I see the commercial for the new iPod, which also shoots video. It’s compact and aesthetically pleasing; it comes in practically every color of the rainbow – and gray!