I was visiting New York last week and noticed something that I could not believe about the city. Nightlife was very much dead and I’m not the first one to notice it. Today life, that mad mixture of yells, chatter, hustle and rudeness, was quieter.
Lower Manhattan is now a Disney-like string of malls, riverside parks and pretty upper middle class villages. There was something else. When I looked at the throngs on the pavements, I saw the reason.
There were little white wires hanging down from their ears or tucked into their pockets, purses or jackets. The eyes were a little vacant. Each was in his or her musical world, almost oblivious to the world around them. These are the i-Pod people.
Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble.
Every now and then, some start emitting some strange tuneless sounds and their fingers snap or their arms twitch with some soundless rhythm. When people tell them, ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Hello’, there is no response. You are among so many people and hear so little. But each one is hearing so much.
I am one of them. I also have white wires peeping out of my ears. I joined the group a few years ago, the group of the little white box worshippers.
Others began as I did with a Walkman and then an MP3 player. But this sleekness of the i-Pod won me over. Unlike other models, it gave me my entire music collection to rearrange as I saw it. Once it was a musical diversion. Now it is a compulsive obsession.
Like all addictive cults, it is spreading. Walk through any airport in the US these days and you will see many of them. You will see them on a subway. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t overhear, don’t observe. Just tune in and tune out.
The worrying fact is that it is part of something bigger. You get your news from your favourite blogs, the ones that won’t challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service for your modern rock or liberal talk. Television is cable. Your mobile phones get email feeds from your favourite bloggers or get sports scores for your team. Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves. The chance of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves, or an opinion that might change our mind about something is removed.
This is atomization by little white boxes and mobile phones. It is a society without the social. We choose what we want and not meet at random. People never lived like this before. Of course we had homes, retreats or places where we went to relax, unwind or shut out the world. But we did not walk around like hermit crabs.
Music was limited to the living room or the concert hall. Sometimes it was solitary but primarily it was a shared experience that brought people together. But now it has become a personal affair. It is now a secret. You never know what the other person next to you is listening to. You will never see him. By his white wires he is showing that he doesn’t want to know you.
What do we get from this? We get the chance to slip away from everydayness, to give our lives its own sound tracks, to get away from the monotony of commute and to listen more closely and carefully to music that can lift you and keep you going. We become masters of our own interests. We keep connected to people like us over the Internet. We get in touch with anything we want or think we want.
We miss many things. The funny piece of an overheard conversation that stays with you; the talk of the child on the pavement that will take you back to your childhood; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others. We also miss those thoughts that come to our mind when we allow it to wander aimlessly through the background noise of human and mechanical life.
External stimulation can crowd out the interior mind. Even boredom has its uses. We are forced to find our own methods to overcome it.
Recently, I was on a trip and I realized I had left my i-Pod behind. But then I noticed the rhythms of others again, the sound of the airplane, the opinions of the taxi- driver, the small social cues that had been left out before. I noticed how others related to each other. I felt more connected and more aware.
Try it. There is world out there. It has a soundtrack of its own.
