You Think Too Much! A life of thought…and some thoughts on life.

In the modern world of iPods, iPhones and the ever-more musical mobile phone…its hard for innocent bystanders not to be the target of dangerous secondary music these days. True, secondary music may not be quite as damaging to the health as the secondary smoke…but it can be just as obnoxious!

Case in point - while sitting in a bus (or other invigorating means of public transport) early in the morning (before you’ve had a chance to have decent cup of coffee) on the way to work, a fellow passenger decides that their nifty little musical gadget would make for a much more fascinating conversation than the human being sitting next to him/her. This considerate person then starts playing tunes at ear-splitting volume that earphones (or earplugs!) just can’t contain…thereby rendering the rest of the bus a reluctant audience, at the mercy of our new dj’s whimsies.

And whats worse? Shorter attention spans and large music libraries have given birth to ‘Musical Snacking’, where we tend to rarely listen to a song all the way through, before moving on to the next thing that strikes our immediate emotional fancy. And true to the new tradition, our DJ went on a horrific rollercoaster of genres…from Aerosmith to Sting to Dido to Nirvana in a span of 10 minutes. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love these bands and tracks played…and I’m not against technology (i absolutely love it, in fact) or a little ’snacking’ myself…but just where do you draw the line on private space? Don’t airwaves count for something too? At first it was mobile phones and loud conversations…then proud owners and their obnoxious ring tones…now we’re stuck with a more professional level of sound, but just as little control.

I’ve noticed one reponse to this in public spaces has been for more people to get their own iPods and phones and enclose themselves in their own private bubbles…blocking others’ music selections with their own. At the end of the day though, its always the innocent bystanders that suffer the brunt of secondary vexations, be it smoke, music, noise or something else.

Getting everyone to change is no easy task…so perhaps the next invention to look forward to would be personal noise-cancelling devices (and maybe something for the secondary smoke too later ;)). This’d give us the perfect private bubbles we’re looking for. And what about human contact, you say? Well, with the increasing connectivity and a ’smaller world’ we still seem to be getting further and further away from each other on a personal level…but as is evident from our everyday choices, this is a price we seem to be willing to pay. Welcome to the new world, everybody.