For some, iPod can lead to isolation

Christmas came a few months early at Duke University this fall when all incoming freshmen… Christmas came a few months early at Duke University this fall when all incoming freshmen received sleek, new iPods with their usual orientation-week freebies. The giveaway was part of a program called the Duke Digital Initiative that seeks to integrate new technologies into the classroom. Administrators supported the measure, asserting that students could use the iPods to download audio clips of missed lectures as well as mp3s offering guided tours of the campus.

But the initiative was only a mild success. A mere 17 classes fulfilled the iPod requirement; most of them, not surprisingly, were in the music department. Despite the initial failure of the program, Duke has said that it will continue to offer free iPods to students enrolled in classes that will utilize them properly.

While on the surface Duke’s iPod giveaway may appear to be just a blatant public relations stunt designed to attract a more competitive class of students, the more engaging issue is hidden. That is, what role should universities be playing in the endorsement — and outright enforcement — of burgeoning new technologies like the iPod?

Try for a moment to imagine what our campus might look like today were Pitt to suddenly distribute thousands of iPods to the student body. Consider one of those rare, warm Friday afternoons in the spring, when hundreds of students are lying out on the Cathedral lawn. Now imagine the little white wires dangling from behind the earlobes of every student, while the rest of your colleagues pad silently across Bigelow Boulevard, save for the occasional rustle of a backpack and a murmured “excuse me.”

The brass over at Apple headquarters would have little reason not to be content with such a Gibson-like dystopia. “Imagine,” the iPod Web site says, “you could fly from New York to Paris and still have hours of listening time leftover as you stroll the Champs Elysees.”

Thanks to the iPod, the implication is that we no longer have to acknowledge the existence of that stranger sitting next to us on the plane. We can even visit France without polluting our ears with their subversive, anti-American jabber. And since the iPod only requires two hours to charge, that same afternoon we can tour the Louvre to Jay-Z and Linkin Park without uttering so much as a single “bonjour.”

Gee, you know it’s a wonder the French don’t, like, scorn us or anything.

It’s too early to say how many schools will follow Duke’s lead. Meetings are no doubt being held in boardrooms across the country as campus administrators prepare for the invention of the next gimmick that they can be the first to adopt. Let’s hope that Pitt resists the urge.

Universities should be fighting against such trends, not advocating them. One of the tasks of higher education is to make us students of the world, mindful and considerate of perspectives other than our own.

The willingness of college administrators to embrace this kind of technology so enthusiastically reflects a disturbing trend toward isolation: one in which students are increasingly choosing to block out the things they don’t want to see and hear.

Dispensing free iPods may seem like a harmless and ultimately insignificant gesture. But when administrators are the people openly encouraging their use, they are inadvertently discouraging dialogue in open forums where it matters the most.

Just the other evening, I was riding the 61C to Oakland when two men in front of me began bickering with each other about politics. Their conversation quickly shifted to whether John F. Kennedy would have been a one or two-term president had he not been assassinated and how crucial qualities like charisma, charm and good looks still are to contemporary politics.

I leaned forward in my seat to eavesdrop in as the girl in front of them, who had also been listening intently, whirled around and injected herself into the conversation. The men were at first slightly taken aback, but within minutes they had incorporated both of us into the discussion.

I looked around the bus at the tired faces nodding along to whichever beat they had chosen for the brief ride and felt thankful for a change that I had left my Discman at home. The batteries had run out the night before, and I was suddenly in no hurry to have them replaced.

Michael Darling is listening to what you have to say. E-mail him at mdarling82@yahoo.com.