Pet sounds: my iPod is reading my mind.

• Author: Drum, Kevin

The Perfect Thing By Steven Levy $25, Simon & Schuster

Back in 2001, before the iPod was introduced, I became fascinated by the idea that you could, literally, hold your entire music collection in a device not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. So, I bought one. It came from a company called Archos, and though it was sort of clunky looking and jittered a bit when it played the MP3s I had illegally downloaded from Napster, it really did hold an astonishing amount of music.

A few months later, though, it was collecting dust in a desk drawer. My fascination with the technology had momentarily blinded me to two things: I find headphones uncomfortable and irritating, and--this is obviously the real killer--I don't listen to music very much. You see, I spend most of my time writing essays and analyzing figures, and I'm one of those people who find it nearly impossible to do those things while I'm distracted by music.

Long story short, this means that I'm probably the perfect person to review The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy's new history of the iPod. I still love the idea of the iPod, but I have no particular axe to grind. Mac vs. PC, Mini vs. Nano, Kazaa vs. iTunes--I don't care. I'm just curious about the remarkable subculture--a word I use advisedly--that Apple has managed to build up around its device. This makes Levy's book close to a perfect thing, too, since it's as much anthropological expedition as it is technological history.

In that spirit, I even decided to test one of the book's cultural assertions myself. Levy is convinced that "perhaps the most revolutionary aspect" of the iPod is its shuffle mode, which allows you to simply start it up and let it randomly select songs from among the hundreds (or thousands) that you've downloaded. Everyone uses it, he says. It's the "techna franca of the digital era."

But is it? Since I write a blog, I asked my readers. Do they mostly leave their iPods on shuffle or do they choose selections themselves? It turns out that fewer than half say they rely on shuffle mode, and even the ones who do mostly shuffle only within genres or within playlists they've created themselves. For a lot of people, it's apparently just too disconcerting to hear Rachmaninoff one minute and Three 6 Mafia the next.

But guess what? It turns out that it doesn't really matter whether Levy is right or wrong about this. It doesn't even matter that shuffle play has been a commonplace practically since the invention of the CD...