Mugging Playlists

Some people have a tendency to chart their lives by "firsts".  The first time you had an alcoholic drink (mine was a lot later than I usually care to admit); the first time you danced the Lambada, the first time you used non-biological washing powder - the list goes on.  

And so it goes that I was on the train last week, driven to thinking about one of my "firsts".  Now I know what you're thinking...but the "first" in question wasn't the first time I bought a far-too-hot-coffee from the buffet car and then did that panicky 'shifting hand dance' with it as I realised it was probably going to remove all the skin from my fingers and there was nowhere safe to put it down.  No; it was in fact the the first time I realised the streets weren't as safe as I had childishly assumed they just were.

It was the mid-Eighties, and a young girl had been brutally killed in broad daylight whilst walking home from school.  I remember seeing the news report for the first time and feeling sick; the incident gave me nightmares and my Dad tried to console me by saying "that girl was listening to a personal stereo while she was walking home, so she couldn't hear anyone coming up behind her!  Sensible people don't do silly things like that, so that's why they're safe on the streets".  Bless him.  He was right, though - the fact that the girl had been listening to music through headphones as she walked home became a big part of the story because it was rare, and the people listening to the news or reading about the incident in the papers could tut, then console themselves that they'd be safe, because they would never do a silly thing like that.

Fast-forward twenty-odd years later, and listening to music through headphones as you walk about has become so ubiquitous that most street attackers probably have their own personal playlists set up for the exact moment they decide to drag you off the street.  Adjusted depending on the crime, obviously... you could have your iPod on shuffle, but that stray Boyzone track just doesn't complement a mugging like it should.

And so what's my point about the train?  Well, it's just that, really - just the fact that everybody's plugged in to their own electronic worlds and almost completely tuned out to anything extraneous or mundane.  Every single person with me inside that packed carriage I was sitting in had their phones/iPods/Kindles out and/or earphones in.  I found it strangely depressing, even though as a friend remarked to me later; "people still tuned out when there was no technology...they'd get lost in a book, or in conversation instead"  It's a good point I suppose, except that observing somebody who's lost in an actual book (not a Kindle; this is important) is generally endearing; they haven't - indeed can't - tune out completely from everything that's going on around them, and the world they've tuned in to is somebody else's creation and not an electronic one, synthetically and self-indulgently formed from an amalgamation of their own preferences.   

Just like an abundance of money isolates people from real life experiences; so an abundance of technology isolates people from independent, selfless thinking.  Well, at least that's what it said in the online edition of my newspaper this morning, anyway.