Amidst the late nineties' bounteous variety, it is difficult to recall the bafflement that July day in 1979 when Sony unveiled a small tape recorder with a headphone. Certainly, it is easier to imagine the health scares it spawned. If mobile phones give us sleepless nights with so far unsubstantiated fears about baked brains and evaporating memories, the hearing losses and psychological ills which would surely be wrought by this new icon of the me generation were part of passionate debate for much of the early eighties. The lessons therein are evident, but there is a charming, though apocryphal, tale about Sony's legendary chief Akio Morita doing the rounds of his empire and chancing upon a small tape recorder targeted at journalists called the Pr-essman. A way off in the distance he spied a pair of headphones. The rest is history.

But if the Walkman offered an increasingly individualisticpopulace a shield against their world, a buffer against the cacophony of lives moving ever faster as against the dulling sameness of post-industrial society, critics argue that it also dented our capacity to appreciate music. They whine that a whole generation has grown up without the patience to appreciate the delicate nuances of a public concert, without the courtesy to make a distinction between fastforwarding music on call on their little gadgets and paying polite attention to a live performance. From here, moans about the loss of community spirit and nostalgic evocations of the story-and-song sessions around the bonfire what with a full-fledged multimedia revolution on our hands are but a logical step away. But if these misgivings fall on deaf years, that's only because, headphones on, everybody else is humming along with the latest tracks.