How the Walkman changed the world
Today, Friday 27 September, “Vic’s gaze. The world before and after the Walkman” by Stefano Solventi is released, the first book in Jimenez’s new series entitled “Turning Point”, in which each author draws on his experience to tell a turning point and broaden our gaze towards other areas and other horizons, offering a possible key to understanding our world and our existence.
“Vic’s gaze” is the story of how the Walkman has radically changed our way of being in the world. The author, Stefano Solventi, took inspiration from his memories, from music and literature, from TV series and cinema.
The Vic referred to, the one whose name and face stand out on the cover, is Sophie Marceau, protagonist of “Apple Time”, immortalized in her turning point, the moment in which her friend Mathieu makes her wear the walkman headphones. A moment that Solventi describes like this: «Vic’s gaze doesn’t see: it floats. It is, as one might say today, frozen. In order for her to see, she is missing a detail of considerable importance: the future.”
Solventi develops the story along the stages that saw the listener go from sedentary to itinerant, paying homage to the pocket audio cassette player created by Sony but also attempting to understand our hyper-connected era more deeply.
By courtesy of the author and the publisher we are publishing a preview of an excerpt from “Vic’s gaze”.
Sony wasn’t doing very well in the second half of the 1970s. The company that wanted to pass for “the Cadillac of electronics” had to digest a sensational hole in the water: the Betamax video recording system, launched in 1975, had been caught off guard by JVC’s rival VHS, inferior in quality but capable of guarantee up to four hours of recording for each videotape. At the end of the decade, the VHS system was increasingly proposed as the standard, even if the Betamax system was not immediately transferred to the closet of abortive inventions. In fact, Sony continued to support it
until the mid-eighties, but it was essentially a case of therapeutic obstinacy.
Nothing strange. Dynamics of this kind occur regularly, it is a normal friction between the market and technological innovation: does anyone remember the LaserDisc or the handheld computer? Sony itself launched the Minidisc in 1992, a kind of floppy disc which, in the Japanese company’s intentions, should have replaced the audio cassette and proposed itself as an alternative to the CD. He would have promoted it with conviction for twenty years, with the results that we know: poor. After all, progress often proceeds on its own wreckage, it needs these techno-dazzles, the wreck of great projects that in some way indicate the most appropriate – or most convenient – path to follow.
Sony, in any case, remained a large company and a point of reference among those in its sector. Because of this he was not discouraged and soon found a way to redeem himself. It seems that it is due to Akio Morita, one of the company’s leaders as well
co-founder, the idea of a device that would allow you to listen to music without having to remain near a reproduction system, that is, small and easy to handle enough to allow you to take it with you. It is said that the lighting struck Morita – emblematically – while he was walking through the streets of New York.
However, there is another version of the story, according to which the intuition should be attributed to Masaru Ibuka, also co-founder of Sony, who was visited by the “eureka moment” during a transoceanic flight: passionate about classical music, he had the habit of taking the TC-D5 with you on the plane, an audio cassette recorder and player launched by Sony in 1978 capable of guaranteeing excellent performance but as bulky as a dictionary. Ibuka would therefore have given instructions to the research department to develop a more compact device: the rest would (is) known history.
What can I say: they both have the appearance of credible and at the same time accommodated stories, so much so that they resemble foundation myths. In the case of Morita it must be added that he moved to the USA with his family in 1963 with the specific purpose of confronting
closely with the mentality of the American consumer.
Having taken up residence in Manhattan, on the famous Fifth Avenue, Morita organized parties, played sports and built relationships. He observed. This immersion in the heart of the most dynamic society on the planet should have been the key to deciphering the code of desires that do not yet exist, those that exist.
technology was called upon to generate with the very promise of their satisfaction.
Whether credited to Ibuka or Morita, the Walkman’s intuition was a true stroke of genius. And it was also because at the time it was anything but obvious to imagine such an invention. In fact, the two co-founders did not have an easy time imposing the design: Sony engineers found it to be a retrograde idea from a technological point of view, since it did not include a recording function and, above all, any speakers.
Furthermore, for reasons of economy and portability the headphones would have been “little headphones”, with an audio performance not even remotely comparable to the bulkier and more expensive models for home listening available on the market.
However, the project went ahead without a hitch. Aside from the name issue.
“Walkman” – modeled on the Pressman, a dictaphone successfully released a few years earlier – did not please the American division of Sony, which rightly considered it a clumsy and ungrammatical fusion between “to walk” and “man”. Therefore, when the device was launched on 1 July 1979, a bizarre situation arose to say the least: in the United States it was presented as Soundabout, in Sweden Freestyle was chosen while the United Kingdom division opted for Stowaway. Elsewhere, probably due to less familiarity with English, Walkman was approved.
The impact on the market did not produce the desired results. A situation that pushed the management to review promotional strategies: finally it was imposed as “Walkman” on all markets and sales soon improved, only to take off in the next
a few weeks. The name, however, was only one of the factors that determined this turning point. Much more important was the course adjustment from a promotional point of view. In fact, Sony understood how important it was to communicate the performative nature of the Walkman, the paradigm shift that it was thought it would bring about in the lives of users. For this reason, an ingenious campaign was conceived: one hundred devices were given away to a sample of users who were then asked to report their impressions of the experience of use in a series of commercials. The focus shifted decisively to practice, rather than to the technical characteristics of the product. And it worked.
