In 1998, I bought a Diamond Rio for $200. My life changed. I could take almost half an hour of high-quality, digital music with me anywhere. I had so much fun creating the ultimate 30-minute playlist every morning. I could walk to class or do shopping listening to music. After a few weeks, I sewed the device and my headphones into my jacket, so I would always have my personal soundtrack. Even though I couldn’t fit all of [amazon_link id=”B000006MTX” target=”_blank” ]Shostakovich’s 24 preludes and fugues[/amazon_link] on my Rio, I was patient. I mean, do I really need to carry around more than 30 minutes of audio?
After a while of this kind of behavior, I got over it.
In 2001, I set up my computer to serve an text file to my website, so when I had my computer on, the text adam is currently sitting at his computer would appear on the footer of every page.
And then I realized no one cared about status updates.
In 2005, I bought a Treo 650. I could now synchronize my iCal with my phone, work on Excel files wherever I wanted, and best of all, send rich text messages, with photos or video. I sent messages to everyone I could, and photos and videos to people who could receive them.
And then it just got old.
Wouldn’t you know it, but 3 things I really hate are:
- people constantly plugged in to headphones
- people constantly updating their status
- people constantly sending text messages
I feel justified that I binged when I did, because I was trying to get a handle on how these new things might affect my life. They were novel. So I binged, reflected, and backed off.
Notice the common term in my list above: constantly. Do people not realize that all these things are incredibly narcissistic? I never before wanted to smack someone upside the head because they weren’t listening to music in public. Do people hate silence? Do people just hate one another more now than they used to? They are certainly now more enabled to exhibit behavior that leads me to believe so.
(For this post I’m leaving out the blog I made in 1995 and got over, since I’m finally in to blogging. And, queue sad trombone.)