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posted by martyb on Friday July 05 2019, @08:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the next-up-will-be-a-Bluetooth-8-Track-player dept.

The cassette player finally goes Bluetooth

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Sony's first Walkman, the portable music player that would forever change the way we consume music. And while the audio cassette long ago fell out of favor for the CD and later digital music, the format's certainly not forgotten. It may not have the same audiophile cache as the vinyl LP, but a a small and passionate contingent of music listeners are keeping the fire burning.

NINM Lab's latest project occupies that same sort of fuzzy technological limbo as past products like the I'm Fine single use camera. It's also got a name to match: It's OK. In this age of political unrest and global disasters, maybe that's exactly the message we need right now. As for a bluetooth cassette player, it's probably true that nobody needs such a thing, hyper specific products are one of the nice byproducts of late capitalism.

A Bluetooth 5.0 cassette player? Aight.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @08:05PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday July 05 2019, @08:05PM (#863610) Journal

    Note that this is a significant digression from the topic of TFA, but since you brought it up...

    Oh, I don't know. The older I get, the more sympathetic I become to many of Allan Bloom's points. I meant to link something about his book [wikipedia.org] in the last comment, for those who may not be familiar with it. It certainly made a big splash in the 1980s in terms of discussion of culture, the changing of higher education, etc.

    I should say that I don't agree with his "doom and gloom" stance on the Walkman, or about teenagers or students or whatever in general. For most of history, there have been older folks complaining about the "damn racket kids are listening to these days." But Bloom does make a larger point about what educated folks were doing, or rather how the supposed education that intellectual students were no longer getting in college. Such arguments always suffer a bit from the "good ole days" nonsense; the past was never quite as wonderful as most people making those arguments tend to portray it.

    However, there has been something significant lost culturally in the past few generations, at least among the educated populace. Maybe it was a waste of time to study Latin, but the goal wasn't generally just to master a dead language -- it was to open a door to other historical cultures which wrote in that language, to engage with them more directly than in simple translation, to confront other ideas, to learn from history so we might realize "there is nothing new under the sun" and also not repeat the bad stupid stuff of history.

    If you spend some time, for example, reading the writings of the Founders of the U.S., you realize how much perspective they had historically, philosophically, morally because of their deep knowledge of the history of Western culture and civilization. And these weren't the great minds trained at the centers of learning at Oxford or in Paris for the most part -- still, they had amazing perspective. And if you read the speeches and even listen to orations given by politicians in the early 1900s, you realize that something was different in their knowledge and perspective and training compared to the crap that passes for public rhetoric today. (Note that I'm not claiming that there wasn't just as much crap in politics in general back then -- there certainly was, but those who could rise above it really rose higher than I think anything we tend to hear today.)

    I know that the types of knowledge we teach and value today has changed somewhat -- emphasizing science and engineering and technology, trying to cram much more math and science into the brains of kids than the Founders could imagine. So I'm not quite a pessimist like Bloom. But I will agree with him on some points that something of significant value has been lost culturally in recent generations. If anything, Bloom failed to take into account the fact that the audience of college had grown significantly compared to what it was when he was educated. The "classical liberal arts curriculum" was never really intended for mass consumption. Yet he has a point that the elite intellectuals among college students also lost out on something.

    And the self-absorbed teenagers of the 1980s that couldn't be bothered to stop listening to their Walkman (which Bloom was complaining about) gave birth to Millennials. Need I say more to prove that maybe he had a point? (I'm kidding about that last point... sort of.)

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @08:18PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday July 05 2019, @08:18PM (#863615) Journal

    And perhaps the overriding point that Bloom discussed was the lack of respect for learning that shifted from previous generations. THAT, I think, is perhaps a much broader point about culture. There were all sorts of good things the 1960s intellectual revolution did about overturning bad stuff, but part of the legacy also seems to be a general suspicion of learning that has now permeated American culture. Sure, "geeks" and "nerds" were picked on before, too, but the legacy of that revolution is only now bearing fruit. Questioning authority and even questioning knowledge has now given way to "post-truth," serious doubts in culture about accepted science, etc. I remember pointing out nearly 20 years ago that the relativism from that legacy would come back to bite the liberals who championed it; tearing down "knowledge" and even "truth" has its dangers, and conservatives have now weaponized that relativism. They learned the lessons of the 60s revolution very well.