The Case of Sony
Walkman
The questions of
cultural regulation
• Impacts of electronic media:
1. Transforming the relationship
between the public and private
shperes
2. Privatized leisure
• TV and radio  encouraging homebased consumption
• Sony walkman  privatized leisure
to be taken into public domain
The walkman: the public
and the private
Organization of social life (both
material and symbolic)
1. Public life  formal institution of
the state, with the rule of law, and
with the world of work and the
economy  office (male)
2. Private life  the realm of personal,
emotional, the domestic  home
(female)
Walkman and the
blurring of boundaries
• Walkman poses a danger to the
established classifications of public and
private spheres
• Walkman took elements associated with
private listening and allowed them to leave
their normal position within social space
and to enter a domain where they were
materially and symbolically “out of place.”
• Walkman represents it as a threat to order
and to established pattern of conduct 
the common reaction is an attempt to
exclude it, to reject it.
The importance of
consumption
• Production of consumption
• Consumption is passive  it
simply involves consumers
following a pre-written script.
• Walkman is used by different
social groups to distinguished
themselves from one another
• Walkman as “distancing” “alienating”
• Walkman used only in certain times  not
automatically suggesting someone slips
from society
• Walkman use is still a social practice 
while one’s listening may be private, the
codes that inform that listening are
inherently social – musical genres and
fashion for example
• Listening privately in public, one is still
socially connected in important ways
• Political baggage: in China, listening to a
walkman means a “silent” sabotage of the
collectivist demands of the Chinese state
(Rey Chow)  where possible mode of
listening is public thus walkman has
political implications
• Meanings are therefore not only prewritten (meanings coming from the
process of production) but also meanings
coming with the process of consumption
Consumption as sociocultural differentiation
• Practices of consumption are much
more varied that the production of
consumption
• Individuals or groups do not respond
to a universal and homogenous
manner to the material culture with
which they are confronted
• Practices of consumptions might be
differentiated but never “random”
(Baudrillard)
Bourdieu
• Consumption expresses taste and taste lifestyle
• Example: food culture of the French cuisine:
• Taste of expensive cuisine nouvelle cuisine:
aesthetic presentation and rare and luxurious items
• Taste of middle class cuisine  proper methods of
preparations and presentation, as well as “the
correct’ foodstuffs to eat for a well-balanced diet
• Taste of working class food  immediacy and
security of abundance: a plentiful food, strong red
meat, solid breads and cheese, cheap wine.
• In consumption: identity values
supersede use value  all
consumption practices are cultural
phenomena and not simply “brute”
economic phenomena
• How class difference is constructed
through the consumption of good
Consumption as
appropriation and
resistance
• Using ethnographic method – what individuals and
groups make of and do with the objects they
consume  how objects are made meaningful in
the processes of their consumption
• Cycle of commodification: where producers make
new products or different versions of old products
as a result of consumers’ activities
• Appropriation: where consumers make those
products meaningful, sometimes making them
achieve a new “register” of meaning that affects
production in some way. There’s a dialogue
between production and consumption
• Bricolage – literally the activity of selfconsciously mixing and matching any
disparate elements that may be to hand –
can cut across given social divisions to
produce new cultural identities
• Media electronic – still place, while
walkman allows us to escape from the
confinement of space (urban environment)
– imposing soundscape on the surrounding
aural environment thereby domesticating
the external world  empowering or
liberating technology that allows a person
to escape the formal confines of planned
city