The latest, greatest music thingy to date

Yes, I'm affraid those ubiquitous white earphones no longer attract the cult status they once did. I, for one, am not surprised - especially when you consider the number of grueling research hours and big-business dollars competitors have plunged into marketing other styles and colours of earphones; not to mention the machines they find themselves attached to.

For those uninitiated, here's how the white earphones work: the earbuds (also white, although any colour will actually do) are inserted into the ears (one in each ear) of a person, donkey, monkey, or anything else with large enough ears, while the other end is inserted into a white rectangular object, the front of which contains a circular dial thingy, a few round buttons and a colour lcd screen. This rectangular object plays music - your music. This rectangular object, with its minimalist design, is small enough to fit in the top pocket of any standard business shirt, or even in the smallest purse, so you rarely see the natty little unit when you're walking around the city, catching a tram or even bushwalking - you just see the headphones, and they're everywhere.

Now, suppose you were a large, possibly global corporation that wanted to knock the market leader off, or, at least the very least, make a modest cut into its market share. Who would you target? The kids, of course: those trend-setting teenagers, and those twenty-somethings, both with money to burn, and who are always looking to stay ahead to the pack, not to mention those miscreant marketers.

So you could start with a website, promoted on the internet, on one of those sites where the said cool kids hang out and try and stay ahead of their musical peers by reading up on bands who use construction work equipment as instruments, or something like that. This website would be a bleak looking black and red flash site, maybe with an address something like www.iDont.com (notice the small i, this is very important), which would imprint the impression of a world and its population decaying from conformity; a reminder of Stalinist Russia, or maybe of Orwell's dystopian universe in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Cutting through this moodily drawn oppression, an alternative presents itself. "RESIST CONFORMITY" the website would shout to all visitors - because who in their right mind wants to follow the path of poor old Winston Smith? Not me, and not you, right?

"Calling all free thinkers, contrarians and malcontents," its manifesto would begin. "The time has come to rise up against the iTatorship. To resist the monotony of white earnbuds and reject the oppressive forces of cultural conformity." It would hit the market leader where it was most visible: the white earphones. A black and white stenciled sheep with those notorious white headphones, hanging down around its neck like a noose, would be the website's - no, the movement's - mascot, and its public face. A variation of Mr Sheep could appear in a delightfully subtle comic strip, Flocking Hell, which could look something like this:


Now, anyone trawling through the site for the first time could be forgiven for thinking this bitter satire was the work of some disgruntled tech-head, disappointed that those white headphones he once loved are now everywhere. They would be wrong. Because, it's not just a movement, it's a revolution; a revolution that comes in the form of a new product - something called the Sansa e200.

It's a rectangular BLACK fusion of plastic and metal, with a large circular dial thingy, four rectangular buttons AROUND, NOT BELOW, the turning dial thing, and a large LCD colour screen. It features not 40GB or 60GB storage space, but a choice between 2GB, 4GB or 6GB, and it does not include a lowercase i in its title. But more important, is it includes BLACK, not white headphones.