This relates to my current, life-altering, new-found reliance on podcasts. I count myself now as one of those distracted drivers zooming around paying more attention to what's in my ears than what's on the road.I was born at the tail end of the boomer generation, so some changes seem interesting, yet odd to me. I was a kid when we had something called mass media. In fact, I may have been among the first to really have really grown up with television. Whatever your thoughts about the quality of programming, TV did have a unifying force. If I ask a guy of my generation if his preference would run toward Ginger or Mary Ann, there's instant recognition of the reference. Isn't the whole concept of society simply access to shared experiences? Likewise, when we listened to the Top 40 on the radio, we knew that although not everybody's cup of tea, those same songs were being heard by just about everybody.
I was going through my podcasts yesterday and noticed how very focused my selection was. Most of my audio involved science and technology. I had spanned the globe in search of only the information I was interested in. I guess this sort of demonstrates the idea of narrowcasting rather than broadcasting.
I can't help but feel a little sad that in our future there'll be no common ground to which we're subjected. New media is giving us fewer and fewer points of shared reference as we each pursue our own little worlds of self interest.