ABSTRACT
The Sony Walkman. Launched on the world in the spring of 1980, this urban, hi-fi, gadget was based on an idea that came to Akio Morita, President of Sony, while, rather appropriately, walking in New York. Over the decade and now into the nineties the Walkman has offered access to a portable soundtrack that, unlike the transistor radio, car stereo and the explicitly opposed intention of the bassboosted ‘ghetto blaster’ or ‘boogie box’, is, above all, an intensely private experience. However, such a refusal of public exchange and apparent regression to individual solitude also involves an unsuspected series of extensions. With the Walkman there is simultaneously a concentration of the auditory environment and an extension of our individual bodies.
