Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends.
Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Early Adopters buy only the latest thing, they are up to the minute, maybe even up to the second, these crazed opinion-formers whose reckless compulsion to spend all their money on rubbish keeps the global economy ticking over. You can’t compete with an Early Adopter, and who would want to? Myself, I am a Late Adopter. I don’t own a mobile phone, I can’t drive and I only acquired a DVD player last Christmas. (And didn’t plug it in for six weeks.) In July it was my birthday. What did I want? An iPod, of course. So ubiquitous are these splendid little slivers of technology that it’s now possible to flaunt one in certain parts of London without being mugged. I had never seen the need to own one before, and now I have had it for a month I can’t remember how I lived without it. This is the tragedy of the Late Adopter. We are the sort of people who go around saying ‘Email’s rather useful, isn’t it?’ and ‘Have you tasted some of those wines coming from the New World? They’re really not bad at all.’ ➤
Fortunately, being the last man in Europe to get an iPod allows all your friends to give you the crucial advice you’d never receive if you were the first man in Europe to get one. ‘Don’t download all your CDs!’ said about three of them, but I was never going to anyway. Who can be bothered? ‘Don’t put any Radiohead on it! You’ll never play it!’ Strange one, that. I wanted the Pod specifically to store all those single tracks you love off albums you don’t really like at all.
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