A Mind of It’s Own?

I recently splurged on the purchase of a sleek, black, 80GB Apple iPod Video. I was never an Apple person. It was IBM and Intel for me from the start which meant not so much an allegiance, but an arranged marriage of sorts to Microsoft.

Now Microsoft has been the main key to my livelihood for the past ten years or so when I began a profession supporting the Intel platform and Windows networking. It has been a relatively good living and for that I am grateful. I’ll never own a Mac and I even run traditionally Mac applications like Adobe Photoshop on the PC.

So much for my personal history of Apple vs. Microsoft. This isn’t where I meant to go with this story.I love music – all kinds of music. If you’ve seen my website you know that music was my main raison d’etre for over twenty years of my life.

I’ve fallen in love with a device smaller than a deck of cards that currently holds nearly a MONTH’s worth of continuous, back to back music and its not even half full. My favorite feature, and one I am fascinated with is the shuffle mode. Press shuffle mode and the burden of deciding what to listen to is lifted from your hands. The iPod decides the songs in supposedly random order mixing your classical and your country with your techno and your jazz.

I love this feature. It is a constant guessing game of exactly what, out of over 7000 songs is going to come next. It is an education in over 300 years of music history and styles in the palm of my hand.Yet, I suspect there is even more than meets the eye.

The cold, digital brain of my little black machine seems to be favoring certain artists and songs over others. I have fed no ratings nor preference data per song – which is another iPod feature. Of course I do have my preferences; but so does my iPod. I find the same artists coming up again and again, and while I have the entire Steeley Dan library on board it almost never plays – and when it does it seems to always be  ‘Reelin’ In the Years ‘.

How is it with over 7000 songs that this random device can be so seemingly subjective? I believe it has a mind of i’s own. It has morphed into a true artificial intelligence. Perhaps a tool of of evil media demons seeking to amass a new generation of clones with homogeneous, Big Mac cultural sensibilities.

Perhaps subliminal messages are being delivered through our ear buds with messages of Orwellian type mind control; in an even more dastardly plot to rule the world.

I guess I’ll take the chance that it is really the cute shiny black music box that it appears to be. Subliminal suggestions or not; I love my little iPod. It gets me through my morning commute and puts me to bed at night.