How do mobile devices change our way of listening to music and how can music change the way we listen to mobile devices?
Started by: Admin
on 03 December 2007 18:32
currently has 2 Comments
Aaron Drake
20 November 2007 19:24
I think a better question (albeit a much larger topic) is how mobile technologies are changing the way we interact with each other which in turn is changing how we listen to music. More specifically it is changing the role of music.
People are becoming more insular. The notion that the world is becoming smaller (which really became popular around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries) infers that people are getting to know each other (like a bad commercial for deoderant soap - a shrinking room full of people) Funny, but just the opposite is happening. People would rather send a text message that call on their phone, or would rather have a conference call than meet for lunch. Person-to-person interaction is reserved for power lunches and special family gatherings. Likewise, listening to music on mobile devices is a way for the listener to cut themselves off from the world - to create a personal soundtrack.
And, so far, mobile devices seem to have become just another way for music to be seen as a commercial commodity to be delivered over/in/to a new kind of device, itself a consumer commodity, rather than as a human process initiated by human beings, for, and in the presence of other human beings, which has been the case for music and for human beings since time immemorial. I'm no Luddite, but I think mobile devices, for all their usefulness and potential, can potentially debase and dehumanize music. On the other hand, like any technology, they could just as well be subverted to some kind of humanizing process. Who knows what that might be?