Audiophiles like to turn up their nose at youngsters and look down on their satisfaction with low tech MP3-sound. That’s fine. But it’s good to know that the debate’s been there for more than 60 years.

In her highly interesting and important article “Portable Pleasures: Mobile Lifestyles with Portable Electronics”, published in Manufacturing Leisure (134-159, 2005), Heike Weber poses two questions:

• How was leisure “manufactured” on the producers’ side in the variety of the offers, the material designs and in advertising and marketing? Given the trend to multi-functionality in portable appliances, which functions did producers define as important for experiencing leisure?

• How was leisure “manufactured” on the users’ side? Did this overlap with the producers’ constructions or were there tensions? How did non-users react?

Weber focuses on the design and consumption of portable audio technologies from the 1950s onwards: the portable radio of the 1950s, other music players (record, tape, cassette) of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Walkman of the 1980s as the main examples. Mobile audio equipment – and portable electronics in general – are important ingredients in manufacturing leisure in that with their portability they question the traditional dichotomous work/leisure-definitions.

In what follows Weber’s article is cited for relevant parts. The whole article is available on the net in this publication:

The portable radio of the 50s and 60s and “alongside” listening

Radio, as a hobby, started in the 1920s as an amateur practice of a few male listeners with their crystal sets and headphones. When loudspeakers appeared on the market in the1930s, radio listening was transformed to a family leisure activity. Compared to today’s program formats, public broadcasting provided extensive, mostly hour-long programs. Radio listening was seen as an educative and contemplative family activity, which afforded attention to be rewarding. Accordingly, domestic sets were designed as big furniture pieces fitting the domestic cosiness of the living room where the family should gather around the set. (139)

According to Weber, by the 1950s, many families had already left this ideal behind, and practiced an “alongside” listening to radio. Alongside listening meant listening while engaged in other activities, housewives enlightening their duties with the radio, men doing their early morning shaving with radio, businessmen travelling with radio etc.

This new practice of listening to radio alongside faced criticism of course. Weber sites Grete Borgmann who in her Man and home in the technical age from 1957 warns her contemporaries: “When incessantly music sounds off over us, while we are engaged in something different, our inner ear is blunted for a real music experience. But also that activity that we engage in, does not have our full concentration any more.” (139)

Borgmann demanded responsible TV and radio usage, which meant deliberately choosing only a few programmes and avoiding distractive ones.

At the same time, portable radios became a desired mass consumption technology, and the sets became ubiquitous. Already in the beginning of the 1960s, the West-German radio industry produced more portable than stationary sets. However, the designs of the sets and their technical features were still aligned to the ideal of a collective listening – having a picnic, group sporting, or family vacations – rather than to portability.

Borgmann’s cultural criticism of listening anytime and anywhere went down as terms like “listening with one ear”, which were used up to the 1980s to criticize a passive and “alongside” mass consumption of music. Despite such criticism listening to music while doing other activities – eating, sporting or the like – were soon considered normal and became the major way of experiencing the radio.

Also, engineers still designed the portable sets with as much hearing comfort as possible; consumers were expected to wish for a natural, concert-like reproduction. Tiny radios were produced, but had only a small market share. The average portable radio was still quite heavy (3 to 5 kg). Thirdly, the conceptualization of the “music to take along” (Philips’ slogan) still followed the traditional dichotomy of work/leisure (142). In advertising, for example, portable radios were connected to the feelings of relaxation, joyful entertainment, etc. but this fun of listening was associated with leisurable or domestic use contexts, not with work spaces.

From around 1960 onwards, gradually also work spaces were iconographically associated with radio listening, e.g., an ad pictured an office situation where one secretary presented her portable to her colleague. Only in the 1970s, an advertising text quite naturally promised “mobile radio listening in leisure time, at work and when on vacation“. Before housewives had always been pictured together with the portable radio. This practice was never questioned since it was not considered as a merging of work and leisure. Housework at home was not measured in money and hours, and was not defined as a productive activity.

Teenagers and portables in the 1960s

In 1953, a questionnaire by a German radio station (NWDR) revealed that the radio was hardly used by youths aged 15 to 24 years, and only a very small percentage had a set in their possession. Asked about their favourite leisure activities, most youths named sports, followed by reading. In the beginning of the 1970s however, listening to records and cassettes and to the radio was the top leisure activity of teenagers, far ahead of sports and visiting friends. (p. 143) Over just 15 years, the significance of (radio and recorded) music for the leisure construction of teenagers had completely changed, and industry offered them music players designed and marketed for this purpose.

The teenage listening practices was not aimed at “sophisticated” music experience, both in regard to the music listened and to the equipment used. Young people didn’t care about sound quality; they just wanted to be independent from their parents’ audio equipment, and valued portability, a low price, a hip design and loudness. Industry marketed small pocket receivers with tiny loudspeakers and a rather low sound quality for bargain prices and in special gift sets to the teenage market. Besides, teens listened differently and to different music than adults, namely pop and rock – a fact which contributed to the widening gap between the teenage listener and the so called “serious” listener whose demands grew in parallel to new technical possibilities of the hi-fi audio industry.

Thus, industry, by realizing its chance to sell a cheap article in mass, and teenaged consumers in their urge for mobility and low cost, shared similar concepts of “portable pleasures”. In contrast, traditional consumer and technical journals acted as pundits of the portable players which they labelled as “noise mills”. In the 1960s and 1970s, portable sets were contrasted with high-end audio technology, while hi-fi, as a hobby, became extremely popular, and the audio industry produced expensive high-end audio equipment to cater for it. (145)

At a time when television had replaced radio as the leading family oriented medium, middle- and upper-class male audiophiles discovered music listening as a new domestic leisure practice. This not only demanded economic capital, but also some technical know-how and a highbrow cultural knowledge, all aspects which were reflected in the expression “the serious music friend”. In 1966, the German DIN 45500 “Hi-Fi Norm” even laid down technological criteria to evaluate the so-called “natural sound reproduction”.

Special interest journals totally neglected the cheap portables that young pop and rock listeners used, stating that there was a vicious circle of bad sound quality and listening habits. A consumer magazine writes in 1967: ”Industry offers appliances which will deteriorate the sense of hearing of the buyer with average claims. As these buyers have a deteriorated sense of hearing, they are satisfied with the cheap appliances” (146)

Thus, two different user groups emerged: the hi-fi adepts sharing a technical identification and emphasizing both the technical and cultural exclusiveness of their hobby listened individually as well as for a longer timeframe; younger music fans did not care much about the technical details of their players but rather about the popularity of the music heard and its meaning for their own identity construction in relation to the prevalent youth culture. Music took a share not only in their private leisure life, but in their identity as a whole.

This division between young music fans and hi-fi adepts was well manifested in recording music with tape recorders. When Philips introduced its famous cassette recorder 3301 in 1965, young users soon developed the practice of assembling own tapes from the radio hit parade. In other words, recording was not the hobby of – the mostly male – serious “sound hunters” any more, but that of the young “hit hunters”. They did not share the technical expertise of the tape hobbyists, but had fun while creatively assembling songs or voices, while re-listening to them or presenting them to friends. (147)

Gradually listening to self-chosen music gained a growing popularity and became a “normal” part of everyday life in the course of the 1960s and 1970s. Towards the end of the 1970s, even the audiophile high-end market accepted it due to the better sound quality of cassette players as well as shifting adult leisure practices. Now, also for grown-ups, mobility and the concept of “instant fun” became a leading life concept.

Around 1980, industry reacted to these socio-cultural changes and began to market ”portable pleasures” that catered for the strive for mobility as well as that for hi-fi sound. JVC for example designed high end hi-fis that looked like stationary sets but had a handle and were thus carryable. On the other side of the audio offers, the teenage boom boxes not only gained size and weight but also Hi-Fi-like technological refinement (stereo loudspeakers, buttons, displays etc.). Boom boxes and ghetto blasters were the democratization, or rather, the proletarization of hi-fi-technology, which now was ostensibly carried along in the urban streets. However, it were still mostly young and male users that publicly showed off with these sound machines. By 1980, also the dispute between the generations had narrowed as the contemporary parents had been yesterdays beat and rock listeners. (148)

Walkmans, Gameboys, Cell Phones – towards individualization

In 1979-80, Sony introduced Walkman (TPS-L2, and its stylish and compact update WM-2). The Walkman was soon seen as a sign of “activity”, “freedom”, “individualism”, “youthfulness”, and “pleasure always at call”. Walkman users mainly listened while doing other mobile – and thus rather public than domestic – activities like jogging, shopping, biking, skating, skiing, commuting.

While users defined the public headphone usage as a tool to reach autonomy, many cultural critics read it as a form of autism and civic retreat. In particular the Walkman use by teenagers affronted the public mind, and the criticism was mixed with a general debate about the so called “Zero Zest” generation, i.e., teenagers who felt frustrated and seemingly were not motivated for any active social engagement. Also, the incipient social and political trends towards singlehood, individualization and economic liberalism with their emphasis on individual rather than group achievements were viewed critically. (150)

This interpretation of the Walkman as a sign of atomism and autism stood in stark contrast to the semiotization of the Walkman as a technology of fun by its producers. “Walkman doesn`t isolate people – it makes them happier”, claimed Akio Morita, the head of Sony. To convince people Sony distributed Walkmans among the whole music scene, both popular and classical. In 1980 and 1981, mass media reported on many celebrities who had become fond of the Walkman technology. It was the Walkman and the wider changes of society in the 80s that prepared the ground for the fast reception of the Gameboy and mobile phones one decade later.

Summary

The story of portable audio equipment is a story of “experiencing fun”. Over the five decades, “fun” has been extending into more and more spaces of both leisure and work, and portable music players have been an essential part of this development. The notions “music to take along”, “portable pleasures” and “leisure on the move” of the previous decades have given way to today’s fun concept in which portables serve for private fun anytime, anywhere. In the end, we are confronted with a situation of multitasking and short-term activities in which the spaces of production and re-production are blurred as well as their previously clearly distinguished logics – rational vs. emotional; productive vs. recreative (154).

For the producers, the last sixty years have been time for creative “manufacturing” of a “fun experience” by which they have attempted to suit a certain lifestyle – be it the pop culture oriented lifestyle of teenagers or the high tech and hi-fi aspirations of male grown ups.

The main challenge has been in the materialization of the immaterial experience “fun” of the consumers and in trying to attach the right ”fun semiotics” to the technology. The history of the past decades shows that producers have been quite successful in anticipating the upcoming consumer culture. In the 1950s and 1960s it was portable music players aimed at the teenage market, at the end of the 1970s it was the cassette, and in the 1980s, and with even more immediate success, Sony Walkman.

The design and functions of portable electronics have changed from leisurable travel companions to indispensable everyday companions that help today’s urban nomads to experience instant fun and well-being. The aspiration for fun and recreation is not constrained to domestic, family or specific leisure spaces any more; it is pursued in both private and public, work and free-time settings and often individually.

Mika Pantzar and Elizabet Show eds. (2005): Manufacturing Leisure: Innovations in happiness, wellbeing and fun. National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland.