Will the iPod generation ever find its own voice?

The iPod is "The Perfect Thing". So claims Steven Levy in his book of that title, now on sale; and you couldn't ask for a better exposition of what an iPod is, even if you don't think it really is perfect.

What emerges from the book is that the iPod is not an "identity" pod, but an intolerance pod, and that more and more of our spare time is pod-filled.

In New York, of course, snobbery has been taken to a pitch of excruciation that Jane Austen's England could never have approached.

Levy tells the tale of a taste attack. Trace Crutchfield last year described how he was confronted by a fellow poddist, not violently, nor sexually, but poddishly. "She pulled out her iPod, and thrust the screen to within a few inches of his face. He was thus forced to deal with the identity of her currently playing tune," which, he had to concede, was very hip.

And then she pointed at his white earbuds, and he had to match it. Of course, he couldn't. "It was a pathetic Pet Shop Boys tune... the sort of thing Nick Hornby would listen to on a bad day."

I was reading some nonsense about how important it is for "millennials", the generation that emerged from the loins of Baby Boomers, not to be constrained by what the market provides.

And it's true that the internet generation can acquire things and attributes that the Boomers didn't even dream of. Books, films and songs can become prime-time successes, simply because the performers no longer need to catch prime time.

Is this really choice? How is it choice, if you start picking your favourite songs based on "what will people think, if they discover what I'm listening to? "

Look at any LiveJournal blog. Each entry is tagged with "music". And the war over "you are what you listen to" is waged all over the web.

Levy observes that this is becoming another version of impression management. "People stock their collections not solely with what they liked, but what they thought would raise their status among co-workers," he says.

Levy says the iPod is "the defining object of the 21st century". But the podcast generation, surely, has to find a way out of the pressures of conformist noncomformity, or it will become more phoney than the most snobbish of middle-class Edwardians.