Something I wrote a while back...appeared in the Tiger, wahoo (but they changed my wording and the title and that made me mad because the title is everything)
What has the world become? I myself sit in front of my laptop with my noise canceling headphones and wireless keyboard, listening to my mp3(or .acc) sounds files, my cell phone in front of me, but why is it that I feel so uncomfortable, like I am lying in a blanket that just is not large enough, a piercing draft sending me shivering, alone.
We live in the impersonal age of technology. Yes we live easier lives, life expectancy is far better than many one hundred years ago would ever have imaged, but with all great inventions and advancements there are certainly trade offs. Not everything can evolve for the better. Communication was increased greatly. The best friend of teenage girls, college students and moms are cell phones. Those little plastic magic carpets that can send our voice wherever we need it go. We stay in touch, but do we? Music is freely traded online, in compressed little files, your mp3s, your mp4s, acc, oggs, and whatever new way to compress music into a tighter package comes along. But what is the cost of all this? Computers, and the email make communication lighting fast, you can stay in touch with many people through email or even make new contacts through facebook. But what does that mean?
Yes convenience is an excellent thing. I am lazy by nature and I like for my life to be made easier by a neat little gadget, but I give up something. Walking around campus it is near impossible to find more than 10 people without an iPod or talking on a cell phone. Cell phones though great at keeping in touch, finding someone we wish to talk to, have deafened our ears to a true one on one conversation. We exchange voices, but are they our voices, can you smell my breathe, feels the vibrations emitted by my, my vocal chords, the way my eyebrows raise when you say something I find interesting, the way my eyes soften when I look into your face? Nah. You just get the essence of my voice, coded into an electric symbol, broadcaster to a satellite, send back to earth to another tower which send it to your little plastic chip that translates that message into vibrations which will be replicated by a little magnetic. That is what you get on the cell phone, a message, a signal, you do not talk to me, speak to me. Your little iPod with 60 gigabytes of “music,” several days worth of song, is nice yes, but at what cost. Music is a feeling, music is an expression of those things, ideas, feelings, that escape expression as Hugo said, “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” A neat electronic package called an mp3 is just a recording, a picture of something great. The mp3 cuts out a great deal of that which is music, so much is lost in digital, passion, love, hate anger, depression manifest itself in the music, the oh so sweet music which makes life worth living, that can never be captured by a series of 1s and 0s. The warm tenor serenading or the insane guitar solo, or the essence of free jazz is not found in a neat little bundle of 1s and 0s, it is found in life, in living
We live in a world where everything is a millisecond away, where we live for 79 years, where with a couple of clicks we can make millions on the stock market from the comfort of our own home, where we can call anyone in the world as we walk to history lecture, where on that walk I can listen to an entire concert on my iPod. Our minds are dulled by such convenience. Gone are the days when calling on someone was actually going to his house in order to talk, face to face. Gone are the days when a letter was handwritten, signed and sealed and sent in the mail. Where concerts were the only way to hear music—where you could see the musician pouring his heart and soul into his art, the vibrations all around your body, or we made our own music, or we gathered around and listened to a vinyl with that familiar hiss and pop, or a hi fi recording, its richness nearly captured by a warm tube amp. Just listen to nature all around you, a walk just to see and hear what is all around you, leaving your world of electronic behind you. To feel the rain on your face, its sweet taste, to feel alive, not worrying about the electronic in your bag. No, we have transformers and ear buds, and razors and chocolates and email and screen names and user IDs.
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