Internet: Knowledge and Community

From Internet: Knowledge and Community

                                 The Keeper
                               By: Scott Taylor	

One of the most exciting things, technologically speaking, about living in the year 2020 is the ease of accessing music. The ability to listen to and enjoy almost any piece of music recorded at any point in time up until now has at last become a reality! Over the course of the past several years, humankind decided to make a concentrated effort toward an ongoing process of really seeing to it that all musical media ever commercially released was comprehensively digitized at last; thus the Worldwide Music Database Project (WMDB) was established. As a result, more people than ever before have access to just about any music imaginable, due to the fact that great strides have been made to ensure that everyone aspire toward being on the same page, so to speak, with regards to global computer and Internet access.

Everywhere in the world, even in developing countries, computers have proliferated to the point where everybody is basically online all the time. It really got moving as things like Google and Facebook radically evolved and got to know our likes and personal tastes very well, so well that, for example, one of the key features of Facebook is now routed to the WMDB: wherever you are, whatever time of day or night it is, you can hear practically anything you could think of. In fact, this app will even figure it out for you. The technology still has a way to go, but currently, most folks go through their day with a tiny, almost unnoticeable Bluetooth-like device called a “Keeper” attached to one of their ears. It fastens as such that it actually sits behind the ear lobe so no one can really see it, although everyone wears one. Some people actually accentuate theirs, like some kind of high tech jewelry status symbol. Essentially, they are customizable devices in just about every way, having usurped the mobile cellular device. Yes, they do a lot of stuff, but what we’re concerned with here is the freedom to enjoy music. That app I spoke of, the one where Facebook is routed to the WMDB, has an option that allows you to hear a favorite song or kind of song in any situation automatically. At this point, the process works by voice recognition; all you have to do is say the name of the song, sometimes the artist as well and Facebook scans the WMDB and quickly locates your desired selection. By now, we’ve all given social networking sites so much information about ourselves that they practically seem to know what we want even before we do! I’m sure it won’t be long before that’s possible, too!

The Keeper is like a cell phone/Ipod/computer/television. Voice command is everywhere right now and that’s pretty much how you get the Keeper to do what you want it to do. If you want to check your email or watch a favorite Youtube video for example, you’d say, “Youtube …” and then name off what you wanted to see and suddenly a screen projects from the Keeper and before you know it, you’re watching whatever you want! As you can imagine, the old ways are not completely gone; some people still have clunky old mobile, hand-held devices and others still have PC’s and Mac’s, but those things have really become dinosaurs in the wake of the Keeper. These devices just keep getting smaller even as humankind’s wealth of knowledge continues to expand, making it so the popular cultural experience has reached an interactive all-time high. We have the ability to explore more than we could possibly ever imagine.

Thank goodness hardly anybody texts anymore, gosh that was really starting to get on my nerves, everybody always walking around blindly, twiddling their thumbs about. Now, our hands are free, and the best part is you don’t have to look like a dork with the old fashioned Bluetooth headset device. The Keeper is still in its formative stages, so it’s not perfected by any means, but it’s nice to be able to do everything from make a phone call, to watch television, to surf the net, even stuff like Microsoft Word…all apps for the Keeper. Yes, you can write a paper by voice command; if you really need to type, a virtual keyboard is accessible. An old fashioned laptop might remain preferential to some if they still require something tactile for interfacing, me, I’ve gotten quite used to my little Keeper. I’ve got about a bazillion musical playlists on mine; music for all occasions you might say. Furthermore, depending on what kind of mood I’m in, I simply say a word describing it, such as, “happy” or “sad” or whatever, and the Keeper comes up with a song or a playlist determined by what I have preferred in the past. It also will recommend other songs that it thinks I might like thanks to the Pandora app. I like this one, because it continues to introduce me to even more music and I am a music junkie! WMDB rulz!

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that vinyl, yes RECORDS have made a comeback in a big way; in fact, that’s the way most people have gone back to listening to music at home or whenever not on the go. I bring this up only because it’s nice to see that people have regained enough attention span to enjoy a record, not only for the unmatchable sound, but for the very ritual and experience of it. Even mp3’s have given way to superior 24 bit files in most cases, indicating that people care once again about the quality of how their music sounds. At last, variety, accessibility, and fidelity have all combined to provide the ultimate musical resource. It’s just nice to know though that record stores have witnessed resurgence in this electronic age; folks are keeping pace with technology without sacrificing substance.

How very fortunate for records to be so popular again, they are often much more practical at parties, in fact djs have never been more popular! You see, when more than one person walks into a room and everyone starts hearing their own music simultaneously, it can get a bit crazy and cacophonous (that is, if the personal headphone mode is not selected. Annoyingly, this is all too often the case and what you get as a result is akin to what it used to be like when you’d be sitting in a movie theater and somebody’s cell phone would start ringing. Arrgg!!) Granted, people can still take turns sharing their own playlists like they used to do at Ipod parties, which is fun, it’s just the whole thing about folks forgetting about the headphone function that gets me sometimes; maybe I don’t want to hear EVERYTHING that you think!

But I digress; I’m guilty of it, too. At any rate, I guess I should be amazed at how the world has all at once become more self –oriented, but not totally self-centered. What I mean is, more than ever before, people are customizing their lives and also sharing themselves with others. Everyone is interested in what everyone else is listening to and whatnot, WMDB is turning more people on to great music than ever before, and social networking continues to grow, it’s reached astounding new heights. So, it seems that no matter how into ourselves we may seem to get, at least we have not forgotten the significance of the social context into which our lives and our likes fit. I can’t stress how much better it’s been since people stopped walking around texting, bumping into things all the time. Thanks to the Keeper, we are actually enjoying more face-to-face interaction than we were there for a while. You’d think it would divide us, yet so far, it appears to actually bring us closer together.

This all comes off as fairly utopian, right? Well, not to go out on a downer, but I hope we all consider the logical progression of this type of technology before it goes any further; by this I mean what if the Keeper, with its built-in GPS, eventually becomes a monitoring device? In reality it already is, it knows what we like, but what if it were to be, in effect, used against us? The more I think about it, this whole Keeper thing just may be a double-edged sword; I love my access to everything; I’m starting to loathe everything’s access to me! And just for the record, I don’t EVER want ANY kind of chip implanted in me! That’s technological determinism for you, I guess…