At first I thought I was just tired of my music. I'd had an iPod for a year or so and increasily found myself skipping from song to song on shuffle mode, vetoing each one after about 5 seconds. Was I really tired of all 3,800 songs? Or was something else happening?
I dimly remembered using a CD player at one time and merrily rotating through maybe 10-20 CDs. I didn't have immediate access to seven Kinks albums and the entire recorded output of The Monochrome Set, but then again, I wasn't frantically changing CDs every ten seconds looking for the "right" song. I resigned myself to this being yet another symptom of my rapidly deteriorating attention span, like reloading Gawker every 3 minutes.
One day I saw a guy on the subway using his iPod in exactly the same way -- it bore as much resemblance to music listening as skimming a web page does to reading. I felt at once relief (it's not just me!) and despair (our culture is going down the tubes!).
So, people, are you having this problem too? Do we need a "slow music" movement where we dig out our old cassette and CD walkmen so we can learn to listen to whole albums again instead of skimming? I ask this question knowing full well that they'll have to pry this $300 hunk of white plastic from my cold, dead fingers (cue appropriate song, whatever that is).
(Don't even get me started on podcasts. I've caught myself many times trying to listen to a radio program and simultaneously read a web page or something. That, I assure you, works really well.)
Posted by Damian Chadwick on August 3, 2005
http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/08/musical_attenti.html
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