Technology is changing our world
Illustration by Melissa Joseph
Over the past 20 years, technology has changed the world in many ways. It has changed the way we communicate, learn, socialize and the way we listen to music.
In the 21st century, listening to music is constantly getting easier with many modern and high-tech devices. The development of audio technology has allowed us to enjoy any songs at our fingertips.
Smartphones have made it so we can talk, watch and scroll all while listening to our favorite songs. Say goodbye to the times that we were stuck listening to whatever song came on the radio or listening to CDs.
Modern technology has advanced the way we listen to music in ways we could have never thought possible.
How did we get here? It started around 40 years when portable music devices weren’t even a thing. Shocking, right? With the first music device being a music box the size of your toaster, no one would have ever thought we would come so far with technology.
Along with how easy technology has made it for us to listen to music, it has also made it easier for us to shut out the real world. Every day I walk around campus seeing people with their AirPods in and their faces glued to their screen.
Technology has done so many great things, but it has also cut off face-to-face communication. Students on campus walk past each other all the time without even as much as a smile.
This isn’t just on campus either, I see it everywhere. People looking down at their phones, avoiding eye contact with every person that walks by them. Almost everyone in our generation is guilty of this, myself included.
I know sometimes walking to school I’ll put my headphones in and shut out the existing world. I know everyone does at least once, and it’s not necessarily a huge issue until you realize how much you’re missing.
Technology has done so many great things for the music industry and listening to music is one of my favorite things to do. Music means so much to so many different people and it’s something that connects us. There’s nothing wrong with listening to music, but finding the right balance between listening to music and shutting out the world is key.
In reality, the technology that is supposed to connect us is breaking us apart in ways we aren’t even noticing.
Learning to appreciate the world without technology of any kind is important. You don’t want to miss out on the world because you’re too invested in the technology that’s supposed to connect us.
Ernest Meyer // Apr 10, 2020 at 6:50 am
You make a good point. Perhaps a little history to this evolution would be interesting to you. After I finished work on designing the Pentium I at Intel in 1995, one of the first Japanese cellphone companies hired me, Oki. There the idea of text messaging was still being developed, and one of the things we discovered is that people did not want to send messages more than 160 characters. Mostly people wrote things like they were in the supermarket and should they buy more milk. Originally we had thought more intellectual communiccations, and allowed for longer messages. But we found cellphone adoption by new users was inverse to educational level, that is, people with Bachelor degrees bought cell phones 10 times less frequently than those without; and that people with doctorates were a thousand times less likely to buy a cellphone. This was a big topic when I went to work for Larry Ellison at Oracle. One day there was a debate on public radio why birds sing in the morning, and David Attenborough commented in the show that he thought birds were basically singing ‘here I am, over here,’ because at that hour in the morning, there’s no bugs to catch yet, so there wasn’t anything else to do. Well you may think that was not pertinent. However Larry Ellison understood right away what I was considering, and replied ‘if people want to twitter like birds, then it’s our role to help them do that. We’ll make a network for people to twitter like birds. Its not our role to judge the stupid things they want to say. If that’s what they want to do, that’s the service we should provide.’ However he decided he was too busy running Oracle to do it himself and gave a bunch of money to someone else to do it. So that’s how twitter came into being, and, if you like, why trump got to be president. Of course I am an elitist academic and have a very low opinion of the whole thing, and retired to make DSP algorithms for Hollywood instead, and greatly prefer the relative peace of Chico to Silicon Valley. Other people actually did it all. I was just there when it happened. Sometimes I deeply regret conceiving Twitter, personally, but Larry Ellison was right. It wasnt our job to decide what to do with the technology. That’s up to people like you 🙂