iPod Nation

The iPod is a great product. That's no great insight, of course. How cool is it that you rip the songs you like off of your CD's or download individual songs and mix them up into playlists of whatever theme or order you like. No more buying PYT to get Beat It and Billie Jean. No more buying Bullet the Blue Sky to get Where the Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and With or Without You (the greatest three-song opening of an album ever, by the way). It's revolutionary.

Not only that, not only that, but the iPod is this tiny little thing into which you stuff a 1,000 songs. No more dragging a pack full of CD's on trips. I haven't yet set it up to run in my car, but that should rock. Plus the iPod is just elegant. Run your finger on the little circle to scroll down a menu or adjust the volume. It's just a beautiful product.

And it scares me a little.

Go to the gym now. Essentially, every single person in the building has wires coming out of their ears. The teenagers, the 20-somethings, the working professionals, the retirees. I think that the only person I now see at the gym without an iPod tether is Lenore, the older woman who talks to everyone. Everyone. And it's not just the gym. It's everywhere. On the street - iPod ears. Grocery store - iPod ears. Haven't seen it in court yet, but I'm sure there will come a day (although judges will fine you if your cell phone goes off in court, so the iPod's day in court may be a ways off).

What the iPod has done is encourage and allow people to basically develop their own worlds. You don't have to listen to other people's music. You don't have to listen to other people, really. You can download podcasts, so you don't really have to listen to other people's opinions much if you don't want to. If you have iPod's little friend TiVo, then you don't have to watch TV shows when THEY want you to watch them and you for damn sure don't have to watch commercials. And, hell, we've had the Internet for years, so we all can read pretty much what we want.

Basically, what the iPod represents in some way is our increasing ability to edit the world to our liking. Computer storage technology has become so potent that you basically can have whatever information you like come in through some digital pipe or another and just select the stuff that you want.

It's a good and a bad thing. I quite love the iPod and TiVo. I quite like having five different 80s playlists that I mixed myself. I love being able to rewind a sports game to see the disputed call or The Office to catch what hilarious thing someone muttered under their breath.

But, if everyone is doing this -- and they are, I think, in some form -- then I think we're losing something. We don't have a lot of common experiences. And then we have something like an election and we just can't understand for the life of us how anyone could be on the other side. That's probably not ideal.

Of course, I'm guessing that hip guys like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton probably would have loved a nice Nano. Washington and Lincoln are a little harder to picture with ear buds.