I was watching some people on the bus the other day and noticed that nobody was talking to anyone else. This is the same scene that I see every day while taking public transportation, but I was more observant that day about my fellow passengers, having left the book that I had intended to read at home on the kitchen table. More than half of the passengers had some personal data device to occupy their attention. Two people had cell phones, one had a gaming device, and twelve people were enveloped in the bubble of sound created by their ipods. When I noticed how alone they were in the music that only they could hear, and how alone we all were sitting next to eachother on the bus, I thought: isn't it funny how some things are labelled so appropriately?
"ipod". "I" is the operative and descriptive part of the label of this small device. If I am listening to an ipod not only am "I" listening to music alone and shutting out everyone else, but "I" am also in complete control of what I listen to, and nothing unique nor surprising is going to enter my ears or my mind. "I" choose my playlist, from artists and song choices I have already been exposed to. "I" will never be exposed to new sounds or concepts or issues or creativity, if I choose not to be. This is the aspect of the culture of our technology that is most disturbing. It signals the advent of a greater isolation than just having little soundnubs in our ears.
Music is more than just entertainment. Music is a symbolic representation of the mood of an era, it is an agent of catharsis and change; music allows us to experience life more fully and sometimes, music changes us, as individuals, in radical ways. Music is also something that has been shared at a communal level for eons: how each generation passed along it's beliefs, it's faiths, it's awareness of itself and the world. In some more recent generations, music has shifted the entire paradigm of our shared reality. Can anyone think of the 1920s, the 1940s or the 1960s without thinking of the music of those days and how massive groups of people embraced ideals and were motivated to work within the framework of a "Bigger Picture"?
When everyone has their own playlist programmed into a machine that only has one audience, we walk away from the communal pool of culture. We declare our individuality as a sovereign state and end the union of our personal culture with that of our society.
When we take away the power of the unknown and eliminate surprise from what we experience of the world, we voluntarilly become limited beings. We make our minds and hearts small. We place a cap on our consciousness. Some of the most powerful influences that shaped me came in the form of music. Music that I had never heard before, music that came to me through tuning into the radio; that travelled the airwaves from Montreal, New York, and Burlington, VT. It took a lot of attention to learn the songs, discover the artists, and absorb the messages. The fire of activism and an awareness of layers of reality were lit up in my mind by songwriters such as Bruce Cockburn, Adrian Belew, early Peter Gabriel, Pete Seeger, a not-quite-famous U2, and an as yet unknown band from Athens Georgia called REM. Independent radio stations still existed in large numbers and they played much more diverse selections than top 40 or pop radio stations who were dependent upon big corporations for their funding. The new, the old, and the classic came washing through my adolescent attention. And when I shared what I heard with others, I found that these sounds were something sublime, shaping our ideals, our world concept, our intention. We were united by something larger then ourselves: a shared understanding of how we wanted the world to be. What happens to the potential of that communal comprehension when we turn on and tune in only to our personal preferences and drop out of the shared reception zone?
Do we become disconnected? Disjointed? Dysfunctional? Dis-harmonious?
The technology behind these little machines is not inherently negative. The tendency to hide behind it and shut out all other human beings, is. Increasingly we are capable of making the choice to isolate. Personal computing at the laptop, meals for one in the microwave, one person in one car driving to work, cell phones in every pocket, and one set of tiny soundnubs in one pair of ears emitting sounds that only one person can hear, tailored to one person's taste.
One of the best surprise discoveries of my life that came by way of music was a song by George Harrison that contained the refrain: "...tell me, who am I, without you?..." That's a good question. I think that "i" will start a conversation the next time I travel on the bus and forever leave that book at home.
"ipod' is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.
Lyrics: "What is Life" by George Harrison c. 1970 from the album All Things Must Pass
