Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod

Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.”

I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny.  Typically, uncertainty is associated with fear, anxiety, dread, and all things terrifying — indeterminacy is the Other to the certitude of intellectual mastery.  However, there can be pleasure in the unexpected — a “pleasant” surprise — and this is the crux of Apple’s iPod campaign, which is selling a product that literally “shuffles” (or “randomizes”) song files in unexpected and uncanny ways. 

The “random” function of listening to music is nothing new, of course.  Ever since I first saw a CD player (let alone a jukebox), I’ve seen this ability — and of course ANY item that can be indexed can also be randomized.  You can close your eyes and randomize your tunes.  Almost any commercial music player (CD or mp3) can be set to randomize.  While you can “certainly” set up a play list and know exactly what you’re going to listen to on a Shuffle, it’s true that the Shuffle can pull random songs off of a hard drive and mix them up on the device so that you’ll never know what you’ll get when you listen to it.  But we experience the uncertainty of randomization and the unexpected when we listen to the radio, too, so something else is going on here. 

What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”? The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity.

The marketing of the iPod attempts to package the tropes of the uncanny in both subtle and over ways that overdetermine the ambiguity between the familiar and unfamiliar in order to HIGHLIGHT its “magical properties” as a commodity.  The iPod device itself is so alien in its flat “obelisk” design and lack of external readouts that we need to be sold on its symbolic power as much as its actual capabilities.  As a consumer object its familiar dial/wheel is still radically unfamiliar in that it appears to resemble a remote control for something inexplicably not present — a dismembered part of a missing whole — a partial limb of a larger organism (and it is indistinguishable from the “Apple Remote” in fact).  You can’t see any readouts or windows on the device to know what songs are coming.  You can’t know what’s coming when you press its buttons, either.  It is, in effect, a pure randomizer — like a magic wand that can conjure something unexpected-yet-ostensibly-enjoyable.  It’s almost like they’re selling the remote without the TV.  Apple is selling the potential of “chance,” mediated by the very act of randomization its technology enables, as something magical, so listeners can experience the uncanny surprises time and again.

From my perspective, the ‘uncanny’ elements of the packaging are most evident in the 2005 TV commercial for the Shuffle, which features the familiar “dancing silhouettes” (aways like ghosts) who dodge the threatening approach of those animated two double lines.  The music implies that these random attacks are fun, but to me it appears a little frightening as those unstoppable lines keep coming, worming their way out from the corners and borders of the frame as if virtually charging at them on their own accord. 

In the entire merchandising of this product, the “strange familiarity” of the iPod is reinforced by the familiarity of the graphic design.  As designer Stephen P. Anderson astutely points out in an entry on his blog, the iPod Shuffle alludes both subtly and directly to the marketing of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum.  From the “gum stick” design of the device (whose instruction manual actually (jokingly?) warns users not to chew it!) to the way its packaging employs double arrows (employing the familiar “random” icon of interlaced arrows from iTunes) and shades of mint green to draw on our common social perceptions, the shuffle is one consumer product alluding to another famous consumer product, in the interest of being both “familiar” and yet “strange.”  The allusion is to Doublemint gum — a product whose packaging and advertising I align with the doppelganger in my book on The Popular Uncanny — simply amazes me.

What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”?  The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity.  For one thing, the source for the songs is known so a listener will not be surprised to hear Peter Frampton “come alive” on their iPod if they own that CD.  Instead, they may have forgotten that they own Peter Framptom — that his music is lingering in one’s archive like the dead — and his music will become reanimated by the iPod.  The “a-ha” moment of hearing Frampton “come alive” again is like the logic of the return of the repressed. 

My point is that the way we interface with the media is very much analogous to the way we interface with our own memory banks.  The technology is treated as organic, anthropomorphic — and given “supernatural” agency because of it.

There are algorithms at work behind the randomizing process, but we wish they were something else, because recognizing the pattern removes the thrill and the irrational belief that underpins the random surprise.  Consider how a listener at City of Sound describes it:  “I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. I’m currently enjoying the odd effect …Sometimes the random effect delivers a sequence of music so perfectly thematically ‘in tune’ that the sense that iTunes just knows is quite unsettling.”

A related “a-ha” moment that City of Sound is referencing here is the anticipatory glee of hearing how songs thematically concatenate — that is, how there seems to be a “hidden logic” between the song order, where the messages seem to be ordered with a purposeful coherence, or that there is a “hidden” will in operation, spelling out a secret message.  Like, if Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do?” is followed — randomly — by a song that sounds like an answer (James Brown’s “I Feel Good”), an ironic response (Morris Albert’s “Feelings…nothing more than feelings…”) or even just another logical follow-up (“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club).  It’s as if the ‘god in the machine’ is our own private DJ, mix-mastering a secret subtext. We imagine a human agency where there is only random chaos, granting the device the godlike powers we wish it had … but we know that these are really projections of our own desires and our own logic, reflected back to us when we weren’t prepared for it– an unexpected instance of the “omnipotence of thoughts.”

Is the message that we should “enjoy uncertainty” because we have no choice?  Is it a command in the imperative voice, or a plea, or simply a symptomatic response to the illnesses of our age?  Do these products assuage our fears, or pray on our insecurities?  Perhaps, after all, marketing gimmicks like these mean nothing, but Mapping the Marvelous marvels over the Shuffle in a profound way:

while the iPod shuffle slogan “Enjoy uncertainty” has prompted many ironic comments on the reliability of the device, for me it’s pure genius…I’m pretty sure that at some point, in retrospect, the iPod shuffle will be considered the icon of an age characterized by insecurity and the uncertainty of knowing.