Thoughts on Convenience

I am a bit of a luddite. I absolutely love technology, but when it comes to using it, sometimes I shy away from some of the newer and more adventurous technologies. One of these, has traditionally been digital music players. I was a fairly big fan of tapes, and I still am. However - December, 2006 brought around an interesting new device. I received my own digital music player.

There are basically a few reasons why I have had an aversion to things like digital music players.

• They seem to disconnect people from other physical people.
• I'm sure there's some sort of health issue in there.
• Any digital music players that are worth looking at have traditionally been somewhat costly, for somebody with a fairly modest collection of music.
• I have always thought that it was a bit of a waste to keep my music on my computer, as well as on a portable device.

Naturally, there may have been more, or it may just be my aversion to the way people act when they are using such devices. (the same with cellular telephones.) However, it seems as though what the portable digital music player device category offers is convenience, which is not necessarily a bad thing. A good recent example of this is that I recently needed to make a quick run down the stairs and to the ATM machine at the student union. Before, I would have used my analogue tape player on that mission. Instead, I brought the digital player. What I noticed was that I was just as "disconnected" and would have been so, even if I didn't have headphones on. There simply was nobody for me to talk to. Another interesting thing.

Additionally, I didn't have to, or feel the need to change music sources when I came back and sat down, and if my computer were having some sort of issue, or if I were using another computer, I would have still had access to my music.

I guess that this means I must concede... this digital music player device is fairly nifty, and thus far, I give it a rating of "fairly useful" among the sea of devices I've seen, read about, and had the pleasure to use. Naturally, I'm not dumping the tape player, or the optical disc player, but this has probably succeeded those two devices for music which will play on it. (If, however - I feel like only listening to John Tesh's album "Avalon" (which I have on compact disc), or "The Disney Afternoon" (which I have on audio cassette tape) all day long, I will probably use the disc player or the tape player, respectively.)