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| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
I've had similar thoughts about iPods. I just discussed this in MD but...
I think what's happening is a gradual "depersonalization" of a lot of things, meaning fewer and fewer requirements for face to face interaction. In this thread I talked about how it relates to the dance music scene, but I think it has wider implications as well.
Basically I think that a great number of "wired" people are retreating into little ultra-personalized shells made up of entertaining, ethereal, disposable information.
This affects how people buy and listen to music, how they buy other things, how they meet new people and relate to the ones they already know, how they do business, and lots of other things. All kinds of relations and attachments become more casual and less permanent, and people are more easily driven to distraction. Attention spans narrow, and people start to lose their patience in the face of any inconvenience. They might even be disturbed at being alone with their own thoughts, at being cut off from the incessant flow of digital information. |
But, hasn't this depersonalisation process began long before the iPod was invented? I remember a professor saying that before music could be recorded, you would listen to music only in social gatherings (unless you played it yourself). Once the record player was invented, you no longer had to go to a concert in order to listen to your favourite song.
And, this applies to most other forms of art. Now that literacy is more widespread, families don't gather around one of the members to listen to books. Thanks to the internet, we can now have access to paintings that we would have never seen otherwise. This all reflects a more important part of urban life: the emphasis on individualism.
My girlfriend lives in the rural area. It's incredible how everyone knows everything about everyone else there. You often find old ladies (who else?) knitting in the city fair, talking about what's going on in the town. Can you imagine that in a big city? Well, I can't.
My point is that nothing new is going on. We're now heading to a future in which your body is not a limiting factor - you won't need to go to a rock concert to listen to rock, you won't need to go to school in order to learn and so on. The individual will be free to pursue its interests to such an extent that interpersonal bonds might become quite different from what we're used to. After all, just because I've never met most of you in real life, that doesn't mean I don't care about the lot of you... if I could, I'd meet you all 
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