Apple has discontinued all of the classic design iPods with the circle wheel, such as my old 160 gig. The closest you can buy now is the iPod Touch, which is basically just an iPhone but without the phone.
This would confuse me if I were just becoming aware of technology because podcasts are everywhere. Podcasts are the new blogs. I wonder if young people even know that, like “blog” is short for weblog, “podcast” is a pun portmanteau of Apple’s famous MP3 player and “broadcast.” If they associate pods with audio devices, they’re probably more likely to think of ear pods (once just “headphones”) in general or Apple’s AirPods. Younger generations are more likely to have encountered Juul Pods than iPods. And, of course, there’s a group of whales or the thing peas come in.
And then came the virus. Today, there are “education pods” and other social pods being formed. These are (theoretically) isolated social groups inside which students can learn or people can interact indoors and semi-normally, so long as they don’t do so with any pod outsiders. In the Atlantic, Rachel Gutman writes about “podding” (her gerund). “To combat the loneliness of winter, some of us might be tempted to turn to pods, otherwise known as bubbles,” Gutman writes. Later: “No public-health scheme is perfect, and we will need to layer as many of them as we can in order to survive the pandemic. But with pods, the country hasn’t even settled on a shared definition.”
Frankly, I am skeptical that how to behave during a plague is a definitional matter, nice as it would be for us writers. Yet, Gutman writes like it’s a word thing, like people adhering imperfectly to pod protocol is a matter of verbal imprecision or concept creep, not human yearning for a life without onerous restrictions: “Bubble and pod have also run into the same communication pitfalls as social distancing, quarantine, and a host of other new and reappropriated terms this year. Inventing new words or phrases is always a gamble: Their creators have relative control over their meaning, but the verbiage might not catch on.”
I would suggest control is the key concept here, not pod. Control is what we crave this year — and just what we must accept we have less of over others than is healthy to hope to assert. Yet in the Atlantic, the answer to all the difficult questions of coronavirus life is out there, simply not being disseminated clearly and loudly enough.
“Why, then, aren’t we all keeping our pods closed tight?” Gutman wonders, curious why an ape species would socialize. Her answer reveals a depressingly narrow mindset, one that leaves little to no room for individuals and communities to act prudently absent governmental instruction. “When I checked the CDC’s website for official resources on how to safely form a pandemic pod, I came up empty.” Neither the Trump White House nor Biden transition had guidelines on podding either, she reports. “For a concept that’s so important and widespread, health experts and the government have given remarkably little direct advice to the public.” Quelle scandale.
If we lack a shared definition of “podding” best practices, perhaps it is not because public health authorities haven’t explained enough at us how to use words rightly. Perhaps it is because how to navigate the ethics of a risky world is actually a personal question with some obviously wrong answers, but no obvious right one.
