You know, I was feeling a bit lame about becoming yet another consumer sporting those trademark white headphones on in the subway. While I quite enjoy having my small music collection available to listen to while I'm out (which, these days, is about the only chance I have to listen to music), it irked a bit to feel like I'd been bitten by a marketing strategy. I thought -- "gosh, what a trendoid I am!"

Then I read this thread on Mefi. I conclude that, while succumbing to the latest iteration of gadget-marketing may uncomfortably reveal how easily one is drawn into the consumerist web, the practice of piling on the technofetishim re how to make/listen to/mix one's MP3s -- or the criterion for selection of good headphones, or the necessity of hating something 'cause it can't be cool if the masses are buying it -- in the sneering tone of a 15-year-old know-it-all is in truth less appealing than walking down the street to the beat, looking not a little like a hapless demographer's target.

That said, Opus Dark's salvo in aforementioned thread was pretty well-placed.