Read this and then close the browser.

New media have nearly-limitless time-wasting potential. How do we rein it in?

Time is wasted when we get distracted from our purpose or when we have no purpose to begin with. This happens when we go to new media with open-ended questions or impulses. For example, if I want to know "what's on TV," I am signing up for a meandering journey with the remote that could consume any amount of time. And if I sit down at the computer because I am feeling lonely and it offers various products vaguely resembling the company of others, once again I could be in for a long, ultimately-unsatisfying ride.

Purposefulness in approaching these media can go a long way toward reaping the best things they promise without becoming enslaved to the worst of their possibilities. If I go to the TV to watch game 3 of the National League Championship Series, my commitment has definite bounds I am able to evaluate before choosing to engage. If I go to my computer to answer three different e-mails, there is a better chance that I will accomplish exactly what I set out to than if I just open the lid of my computer and see where it takes me.

Note that such thoughtfulness is not nearly so imperative when using older media. There are not too many ways to get tripped up when reading a book. You may read for longer than you intend, but you are still completing a task you knew you wanted to complete at some point. But in general the newer the medium, the better it is at presenting appealing distractions. Media providers make more money the longer consumers are engaged, and so they have made engaging consumers into something of a science.

For instance, last week I signed up for a trial streaming subscription of Netflix. I thought of doing so as gaining access to a library of movies and TV shows. But it was clear that Netflix thought of itself as something more than that. Right off the bat it wanted me to give it some examples of works I liked. It also wanted me to plug in a facebook account so it could tell me what my friends were watching and vice versa. Moreover after everything I watched it asked me in prominent type to rate what I had seen, the better to know the profile of my tastes. Perhaps most subtly and impressively, after one installment of a series started rolling the credits it gave no more than than fifteen seconds before going straight into the next.

So the system is constantly priming itself to dig out new things its consumers will like, and it is actually more work to stop watching than it is to continue. Netflix clearly intends to be more than a library that passively waits to be accessed. Rather it aspires to be a constant stream of entertainment freeing users to think as little as possible in order to be engaged for as long as possible.

For those who aspire to nothing more than enjoyment, that kind of service is an incredible innovation well worth the modest monthly fee. But for those seeking to use new media for their own bidding in larger pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful, discipline is paramount.

Know the questions you seek to answer before sitting down. Answer them, and then stand up.

Play it Again, Joe West

Humans watching humans playing a human sport.

I am a baseball conservative and a baseball purist. My positions are two-dimensional and trivial to guess. I hate the designated hitter and I do not think Barry Bonds deserves to go to the Hall of Fame.

I do not apologize for my simplicity, for the baseball diamond is two-dimensional as well. Unlike any other sport in America we look to baseball for the simplicity, naivete, and innocence elsewhere celebrated only in childhood. Therefore I believe my perspective is warranted.

There is another issue against which I am predictably knee-jerk. This issue is that of instant replay. In recent years baseball has started to follow football, tennis, and others in admitting the use of instant replay to determine "what really happened." So far it has only been admitted in one limited, high-leverage situation: the question of whether a home run was really a home run or not. But starting next year the use of replay will likely expand, and one assumes in the future it will expand some more.

I hate instant replay. I hate it even more than I hate blown calls by umpires. But its advent is hardly surprising given the zeitgeist.

How often have I heard the complaint that ours is an overly litigious society. Well, a challenge by a team's manager to a call is effectively a lawsuit. This is a qualitative difference from the old state of affairs in which the manager could come out and kick up a cloud of dust shouting his face Phillies red, but the call as called would stand immutable. With every challenge we bring the weariness of the courtroom onto the ballfield.

Second, ours is an age that highly prizes empirically-determined objectivity. The subjectivity housed in an umpire arbitrarily bestowed with authority does not withstand for one second the scrutiny of our sensibilities. Cameras are supposedly objective, despite the fact that multiple cameras positioned at different angles frequently imply contradictory conclusions and the fact that video must be interpreted by an observer subject to the same quandaries of authority and subjectivity. At any rate, replay certainly gives us collectively more confidence that we all know "what really happened," and that the ruling in the game reflects that consensus. That confidence is what we are looking for.

Finally, ours is an age that ironically verges on the misanthropic. Previous generations may have had a low view of humanity because of the Doctrine of Sin. This idea was tempered by the idea that humanity was made in the Image of God, and God so loved the World, and so forth. Current generations have a low view of humanity because of computers, and this lowness is not tempered but rather reinforced by a materialistic understanding of evolution. Gary Kasparov's defeat at the no-hands of Deep Blue was only the tip of the iceberg. We refer to "humans" not as noble dust animated by the spark of Divinity, but as a shorthand for members of the species homo sapiens.

Just look at Wikipedia. The entire thing is written to be species-neutral, a ridiculous charade given that all of its readers are human. The page for "Human" ought not begin with, "Humans (variously Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens) are primates of the family Hominidae, and the only extant species of the genus Homo..." but rather with, "You are a human, stupid!"

Without intending to the encyclopedia literally addresses the superior machine intelligence we expect will succeed us in our office as King of Terra Firma. We see no reason why it shouldn't! We agree that evolution has left us with all kinds of quirks that just aren't rational and all kinds of weaknesses that we can engineer a better solution to. We pave the way for our own obsolescence, not just in the realm of engineering but also in the realm of philosophy.

Let the machines officiate over machine sports. I will take the ignorant, loud, biased, ornery, and overweight umpire over them any day. I come to baseball to acknowledge, experience, and celebrate my humanity. I do not need it to kick me back into the dust.

The World Must Be Peopled

"The World Must Be Peopled." Such was my favorite line from William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, which I witnessed for the second consecutive night this evening in Clark Park.

"Shakespeare in Clark Park," having now for a sixth consecutive year provided free performances of the works of he who commanded English like no other man has, is becoming an institution in these parts. It is positively delightful to sit out on the grass in the lovely July sunset with the whole community, being challenged by art which is higher than our faculties rather than being sedated by entertainment that indulges our baser cravings, being shown a portrait of the good life entirely different from that which bombards us in most of our lives.

The experience could be a springboard for several themes with which I have been occupied, but I would like to return to the question of Community v. Network as discussed in my previous blog post, more specifically the related question of Past v. Present.

As is a constant delight to me, dear brothers Jonathan and Ben responded with thoughtful challenges to my views. I hope that we may continue to pursue the truth together, even over this great network and on this ethereal forum, not simply for conversation as an end in itself, but for the discovery of an idea of the good life (that is, the life worth aspiring to and fighting for) greater than either Shakespeare or we have known.

In order to return to this question, let us pause a moment and examine exactly what Shakespeare presents to us in this play. Much Ado is a comedy, and therefore presents something like life in the ideal: life in which the designs of evil may cast a dark shadow, but a shadow that ultimately flees before the light. At the end all is well.

As Shakespeare presents, "all" being "well" is characterized chiefly by a right ordering of human relationships. For him to say so requires saying first off that there is a right ordering, and consequently that there are wrong orderings as well. Contrary to Benedict and Beatrice's early avowals, it is right that they marry, and it would have been wrong if they did not. The estate of Beatrice's father must be carried forward after he dies; Benedict cannot happily remain a bachelor forever, nor Beatrice a maid; the world must be peopled.

Moreover, it was right that Hero should have known no man when she married Claudio. Had the accusation against her not been false, it would have been right that she should be ashamed; in such a situation her father went so far as to say:

O Fate! take not away thy heavy hand.
Death is the fairest cover for her shame
That may be wish'd for.

If we take Shakespeare seriously, we are presented with a double offense. The obvious offense is the content of the moral order here presented, which in our day has been rejected in nearly every respect. But before we arrive at the content of that order, we are first offended that there should even be such an order, objective and received, rather than subjective and created.

That I am in favor of an objective and received order over a subjective and created one, and that the order I believe would better make for peace, happiness, truth, and meaning resembles in many respects the one I have described here, is somewhat beside the point I wish to make. Rather, I would like to ask that we engage the question of the good life critically, rationally, and earnestly, with humility toward the past.

I want to emphasize humility toward the past. It is common to hear easy dismissals of past social orders. But I do not think that most who do so have done the intellectual heavy lifting required to make such statements. In essence, I do not believe they make the effort to understand that which they reject, nor do I believe they claim to.

I can think of two reasons why not. First, doing so is work, and there are many pursuits worthy of work. Second, doing so is unnecessary, because we are fundamentally different than those who lived in the past.

I will address the latter impulse before the former. C.S. Lewis called it chronological snobbery. I believe it stems in part from an idea of social progress that comes from the demonstrated reality of technological progress. The story goes something like this: People twenty years ago did not have the Internet, people seventy years ago did not have television, and people a hundred twenty years ago did not have electricity. Likewise, a hundred years ago women were not allowed to vote and what we now call racism was entrenched and accepted.

It is easy and natural to look at such a picture, which is stark and obvious, and to conclude that just as our technological advances have built on all of the best from our predecessors, so too have our social ideas advanced. We even have an idea of an abstract concept of a "civil rights movement," in which a society slowly becomes aware of a grave injustice in its order due to a minority courageously standing for the truth. I do not know how many times I have heard that such and such issue is "the Civil Rights issue of our time." Such an idea is an analog to the scientific method. It is an idea about how to make progress at a faster rate than it has been made in the past.

While the position that social progress is inevitable and self-advancing is completely natural given a naive presentation of contemporary life, it is overly simplistic. Unlike scientific knowledge, social knowledge does not automatically distill itself over time; that which is wrong is not naturally and inevitably corrected by that which is right. Rather, societies may regress as well as progress. Different ages may be peculiarly prescient, and they may also be peculiarly blind. That statement goes for the past, and it also goes for the present.

If true, we are brought more concretely back to the first objection to thinking about the past: it is hard work. If our age does not have a privileged moral position in the social realm, then the legitimacy of the claims of all other ages might seem to leave us in the midst of an indecipherable cacophany.

While I believe we may receive guidance from the past on how to make sense of the past, I will not dispute that we are left with a very difficult task. But I will assert that doing that work is not as hard as collectively going it alone, of soldiering into the terrifying future with nothing about us but our own wits. I will also assert that buried not so deeply in the sands of time are treasures of such richness that were we to possess them we would not think of questioning whether the manual work of digging was worth the opportunity cost. Luke Skywalker was better able to meet the foe with his father's lightsaber, and Frodo Baggins could not have faced Shelob without the light of an ancient star. We do well to carry with us the wisdom of our forebears.

Finally, I would like to respond to Jonathan's comment by acknolwedging the nonexistence of the kind of ideal past presented in Shakespeare's play. No people has ever built the just society or realized the rightness of all human relationships. But we in our time have considerably better heuristics available to us than "change is good" or "change is bad." In fact, thanks to technological advances, we may be better suited than any people has been to intelligently evaluate the past.

Let us set about the good work together. The future needs the past, and if we do not uncover it I do not know who will.

Communities and Networks

I wonder if the word "community" has become abused.

I am no etymologist, but I believe the original notion of the word refers both to a place and to the people who live in that place. My hometown of Phoenixville and those who live there constitute a community.

People in a community have in common that which pertains to their place, including a particular history and particular ways of life foisted upon them by their shared circumstance. Beyond that commonality, people in a community differ in many ways, but in the traditional sense they are more or less stuck with each other, and they must learn to get along. Healthy community life is a story of unity and diversity, running in both directions.

I fear this concept is more or less antiquated. One reason is that people are not tied as much to one place as they used to be. To give a simple example, my father was born in and died in Phoenixville Hospital. Rest assured, I will not be caught dead in my birthplace of Silver Spring, MD.

Along with this increased mobility, in many places there is no there to begin with, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. In large swaths of the country (including Silver Spring, MD) people are to get where they are going quickly in hermetically sealed containers, with destinations more or less indistinguishable from one another. People in such places are not forced into life with one another, and there are few distinguishing features around which they could build a distinct local identity anyway.

That it is very difficult in the midst of such social forces to keep from becoming alienated from one another and from nature, few will dispute. Indeed, a proliferation of technologies have stepped into the void. Such technologies promise to help us stay connected to those whom we love but who are far off, as well as to forge new and enriching connections.

Whatever the worth of these substitutes, it is important to main the distinction between them and this same idea of a community. They are not communities but networks; not agglomerations of disparate people in a particular place, but organizations of unified people in no particular place. To confuse them as such is to overlook fundamental truths about how human beings are meant to live.

Networks are suitable for organizing people for collective action, for communication about the mission of the group, and to some extent for the exchange of ideas. But they fail utterly at providing meaningful human connection. To take the most basic human relationship, friendship cannot be sustained across a mere network. Through a network it may be kept in stasis for a time, but if a connection is meaningful it will always converge toward life shared in person.

I doubt that these points about networks are very controversial, and yet as the exponentially advancing tide of technological growth drives us into ever more atomized existence, I do not see many making the hard life choices that could make for healthy life in a community. To be honest, I am not even sure how people could do so, short of dropping off of the grid and moving into an agricultural commune. I am by no means exempt from this criticism. I spend in excess of forty hours per week in front of a computer with people with whom I have no stake outside of the workplace, and I spend scarecly four hours per week collectively with those with whom I ostensibly have the closest connections.

Networks are not bad things. In general, I would say they are very good. But they are not communities, nor can they substitute for them. If we intend to preserve a civilization in which people can have meaningful life together, we will have to work very hard, and I suspect we will not receive much help from technology or from the voices of the world.

The Weight of Futility

Cynicism, sarcasm, and a mode of detached indifference called "being ironic" have become the dominant posture through which my generation interacts with the world. This trend likely has deep roots, at least as deep as Bart Simpson, but I believe it has intensified in even the last five years. You could point to a lot of reasons, but a major one has got to be the continued emergence of electronic technologies.

These technologies are supposed to enrich our lives by making more accessible modes of expression that previously required a lot more money and expertise. My dad once told me about the painstaking work of splicing together 35mm film in the editing process when he was a teenager. A method like that required a lot more time and care than any of the free digital video editing programs out there, and professional or semiprofessional packages are not much harder to reach.

Making processes like video editing or photography or publishing easier and more accessible seems like a slam dunk, but one drawback is that the ease of producing the form of the medium can mask the absence of meaningful content. Any idiot can make a coherent movie now, but that doesn't mean that idiot has something worthwhile to say. The result is a saturation of media in which whatever is significant is buried among mountains of inanity.

I feel this malaise when I take pictures with the ridiculously affordable SLR I bought last May. Walking on the beach in Santa Cruz, California the other day I wanted to take a picture of the view looking down the coast at the reflection of sunlight off the ocean. Instantly I was awash in existential angst. First, in the world there are much more beautiful beaches at much more appealing seasons than Santa Cruz in late December. Second, I do not know how to make good use of my camera, and even if I did I am sure there is equipment which would improve the final product.

The connection of everything with everything means my photo could only be evaluated in the context of photographs of tropical beaches done by professionals the world over. Yet because everyone has seen so many of those pictures, even they elicit scarcely a neuron excitation in the brain. To even take the picture seemed a preposterous conceit, like a droplet of water aspiring to become an ocean wave and inevitably collapsing into an inconsequential eddy.

In a climate of such media ubiquity, it is easy to despair of saying anything original or meaningful. Whatever could be said has probably been said already a hundred thousand times, and probably more competently and expressively at that. At the same time, access to all of those prior expressions makes them essentially insignificant themselves.

The resulting world is one in which it seems there is nothing new to say, and in which that which has been said has demonstrably fallen short of the Ultimate. How could anyone interact with such a world, except through sarcasm, indifference, and cynicism? To do so is simply to bow to the crushing weight of futility.

Prayer

According to the New York Times:

"'This is a day of mourning for all of Germany,' Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a brief statement in Berlin. 'Our thoughts are with the friends and families.' "

It's probably better than paying lip service to belief in God when no belief exists. Still, how empty is that comfort?

A Glimpse Into The Future?

According to Fox News, a Canadian woman lost custody of her children for sending her daughter to school twice with a swastika drawn on her arm.

As deplorable as such an act is, it boils down to deeming a mother unfit because of her beliefs. It's not a large leap to see taking away the children of parents who, say, don't take proper action against global warming.

I have read of other disturbing trends in Canada,* such as essentially losing the freedom of speech. As Canada seems in some ways to be the logical progression of trends in the United States today, I wonder if this country isn't far behind.

*Most of what I hear about the Great White North comes from David Warren, who I believe has many true and important things to say.

Teh Awesome

I'm so happy that there is a Wikipedia entry for the word "teh." They actually describe it as an English article.

Only something built on user-generated content could have entries for things so obscure. And the page has over 500 revisions over its history!

What an age we live in.

"Shopping has never been more important."

This quote from Swedish clothing company H&M, the same people who bring us this lovely advertisement on the bus stop outside DRL:

We "believe" that you're all morons.

You may have heard about AIDS. You may have wished you could do something about it. Well, great news - you can go on doing what you've always been doing and wonderful companies like H&M will save the world for you. All you have to do is buy their quality products. "Designers Against AIDS" joins initiatives like the RED campaign (critiqued here by my lovely friend leighcia) which bundle virtue with their products to superficially fight the world's great ills.

Everybody wins. The designers get their names advertised and associated with a "good cause." H&M gets the revenue spike associated with a successful campaign. You get to feel great about yourself for your altruism.

And those suffering from AIDS? They don't actually get anything. It took some digging on the web site, but I eventually found something which told me goals more concrete than "fighting AIDS," though not much more concrete. A whopping 25% of these proceeds go to "raise awareness and prevent the spread of AIDS worldwide."

I wouldn't be surprised at all if advertising for this campaign qualifies as "raising awareness."

Their other efforts appear to be centered on getting people to use condoms, which puzzles me. Do they not consider research for a cure a worthwhile investment? Do they think that since those who have already contracted HIV are going to die anyway, it's not worth caring for them? Both of these areas seem at least as important to me as preventing the spread of the disease (and I imagine that it's controversial how much good condom campaigns actually do). Their exclusion seems to betray some hypocrisy that I can't put my finger on.

So, for all of its noise, the campaign actually does very little more than repeat a message harped on since middle school to wealthy young Westerners.

Meaningless as the stated goals of these campaigns may be, I would go as far as to say their unstated goals are actually sinister. They seek to establish corporations as the agents for moral action in our society, rather than encouraging people to actually care about the problems and actually do something with their lives to solve them. They are a sedative, deepening complicity in an existence centered around consumption and self-gratification. They are poison.

Ezekiel speaks well of such false prophets (and false profits?):

Because, indeed, because they have seduced My people, saying, 'Peace!' when there is no peace--and one builds a wall, and they plaster it with untempered mortar*--

say to those who plaster it with untempered mortar, that it will fall. There will be flooding rain, and you, O great hailstones, shall fall; and a stormy wind shall tear it down.

Surely, when the wall has fallen, will it not be said to you, 'Where is the mortar with which you plastered it?' "

Therefore thus says the Lord God: "I will cause a stormy wind to break forth in My fury; and there shall be a flooding rain in My anger, and great hailstones in fury to consume it.

So I will break down the wall you have plastered with untempered mortar, and bring it down to the ground, so that its foundation will be uncovered; it will fall, and you shall be consumed in the midst of it. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.
Ezekiel 13:10-14

*Other translations render "untempered mortar" as "whitewash."

P.S. H&M is also behind a gigantic photo of a reclining and nearly nude woman above the Philly Car Share pod at 21st and Chestnut - nothing like filling a public space with an image damaging to men and women alike. They also appear to have a penchant for giant murals (like this giant Madonna in New York) which are actually ads - nothing like mixing advertising with art. I hate this company.

Response: Corporate Cosmopolitans and the End of Place

Matthew has a well-developed sense of place.

My good friend Matthew recently wrote an excellent essay in response to Manuel Castells's "The Social Theory of Space and the Theory of the Space of Flows," which I have not read.

A major point that Matthew highlighted was the creation by elite corporate society of a globally homogenous living space. Meaning, people with elite (consulting, managerial, etc.) jobs which jet them across the country and the world can find the same living arrangements and lifestyle wherever they go: the same diet, the same hotel furnishings, and the same separation from any locals who aren't serving them.

In this way, these people are freed from the demands that crossing between places of different cultures and histories would place on them, since everywhere that they go is part of what Matthew calls "one global, virtual city of the elite, with outposts all over the physical world" and what Castells calls the "space of flows."

This transcendence of culture and place is precisely what makes such people elite. Instead of traveling to different "places," each with its own unique nature, corporate elites merely inhabit extensions of the same "space." In this view, the value of different locations rests only in the sum of their consumable attributes; New York and Los Angeles become the only cities of worth in the United States. "Whatever they got here they got there, right?" Matthew says of anywhere else.

I notice such an outlook as a student here at Penn.

I was annoyed last semester when the Undergraduate Assembly announced that they would be bringing The New York Times to campus for free this semester. Why not The Philadelphia Inquirer? I realize the Times is larger and regarded as the nation's paper of record, but inescapable is a sense of widespread indifference about the city we live in.

It makes sense in light of the space of flows. Students at the visible top of the ladder at Penn are corporate elites in training, and New York is the nearest gateway into the space of flows. Penn's location in Philadelphia is irrelevant, since the University is just a clearinghouse for the big firms. So students spend four years without leaving the campus and don't look back after graduation.

Penn gives plenty of lip service to being part of the surrounding West Philadelphia community, but its claims are ridiculous in light of the indifference its primary constituency holds toward its surroundings. The University is in the business of attracting the most gifted graduate and undergraduate students, and it doesn't do that by caring about West Philly. The students that come are in turn just passing through, on their way to jobs that also couldn't care less about the city. So they don't care either.

It bothers me for several reasons. For one, as a native to the Philadelphia area, I know that there is a ton that people are missing by ignoring it. There's much of value to learn and experience here, and to see students close their eyes to it is frustrating.

For two, whether or not individual students and the University at large put anything into the city, they are certainly reaping its benefits. Instead of being part of the community, they are - you guessed it, Jon - merely consumers.

This outlook is reinforced by the same philosophy governing the space of flows: West Philly is the space that students inhabit during their time here, not a place. Its own narrative is something separate, parallel to their own lives, not something of which to collaborate in writing the newest chapters.

And the upshot is not that the West Philly community loses and the University community wins; rather, everyone loses, for to be divorced from place is a great cost to the student. Likewise, were the student body to view itself truly as a part whose welfare is bound to its whole, even if temporarily, everyone would benefit.

Penn's community indifference is a popular topic to complain about, but I thought interpreting it in the framework presented by Castells was insightful in understanding it and in linking it to the greater values that drive people through Penn.

Understanding is well and good, but what can be done about the problem aside from complaining? Well, let's think about it.

Personal Media Player Purchase - Philosophical Analysis

A couple of other concerns nagged at me about whether or not to buy an mp3 player.

It’s the earbuds.

iPod is actually a great name, because the device enables each person to disconnect him or herself from the rest of the world. Because of the portability and the sheer amount of songs you can fit on one of those things, it’s common for people to listen at any time in which conversation is not required.

Instead of listening to the sounds offered by his or her environment, an mp3 player gives its owner the option of piping in more agreeable or more stimulating or less confrontational media. Surroundings become muted. Anything that wants to get attention must fight through the chosen tunes.

So mp3 players encourage the impulse, part of human nature, to withdraw from the rest of the world into a universe in which we are the center. I’ve been part of at least one conversation in which I was competing with an iPod for attention, and it isn’t a good feeling.

To summarize, iPod --> solipsism --> uncomfortable Nick.

I went on a bike ride today, from my house out to a nearby track for a one mile run,* and I took my Sansa View. I was delighted to be accompanied by enjoyable music – it really is magical to have clear and beautiful music delivered by tiny buds which you hardly feel.

By my third lap around the track, the novelty had worn off. Rides are when the silence and the slowly changing landscape help me listen to God, away from the warring stimuli that usually block him out. I realized the last thing I wanted to do was take the stimuli with me during one of the few times I’m actively seeking to hear his voice.

All of that said, weighing all of these concerns I still decided to buy the View, and I really do like the nifty little thing. The experience of brushing my teeth was much improved by listening to The Grateful Dead, and earbuds beat laptop speakers by leaps and bounds.

In general, it’s great to be able to fill boring or half-occupied times with good listening. I just think there’s plenty about these innocuous seeming things to be cautious about.

*Run. Lumbering, panting jog. Same thing.

P.S. Another minor concern was the continuing trend toward more convenient but lower quality music. i.e. live performance --> vinyl --> compact disc --> mp3. But it's hard to argue with a format which allows such a variety of music with such portability. And you have to really listen for the difference at a reasonable bitrate.

Personal Media Player Purchase - Brand Analysis

My market analysis ignores the factor that brand has on the decision, which is actually quite significant. Given Apple’s domination of the market and the iPod’s status as a major cultural icon of this decade, the choice to buy an iPod or another brand makes a statement about who you are.

When I’m not compromising my principles, I strongly resist joining the crowd. Exceptions to this rule have not fared well for me, as the parachute pants I purchased in 9th grade powerfully attest. Something about the iPod’s universal popularity and sleekness and pervasiveness has always made me a little uncomfortable, which is why I came into this investigation predisposed against the iPod.

That said, it is hard to deny the allure of the mainstream. There’s something about choosing things like the iPod or the New York Yankees or Satan that is very reassuring. It’s declaring citizenship with the majority. You’re given a bond with everyone who has made the same choice, which is at least a plurality, even if the bond is a bit superficial. Throwing your lot with the majority means the voices of those who approve of you are bound to be more numerous than the voices of those who disapprove.

And those dancing silhouette rock stars with the white earbuds look really cool in the commercials.

That allure tempted me early in my search to spring for the $250 shiny 80 GB iPod or Zune. It was more than I wanted to spend and probably more than I needed, but that was kind of the point. This once I could comfortably give into my materialistic, image-centered instincts and indulge.

There’s part of me that cares about what others think of me much more than it ought to, and there’s another part of me that looks at the act of considering a price tag as low and a slight against who I am.

You can see the small can of worms that the simple process of shopping for a small electronic gadget opened up for me. In general I think I do better staying out of these things...

By the way, I didn’t (quite) intend to equate buying an iPod with following Satan. I’m sure many make the decision to purchase one without the debate that I went through, and as I mentioned in one class of products the iPod may actually be objectively the best choice. The juxtaposition was (mostly) made in jest.

Personal Media Player Purchase - Market Analysis

I got my new personal media player today – the 8 GB Sansa View.

This was the result of much deliberation and consternation. I spent many hours shopping online, comparing different mp3 players.

I began with the assumption that there were cheaper and better players than the iPod readily available. It turned out the story was not quite that simple. If you’re looking for a player with a hard drive with capacity on the order of 30 or 80 GB, options are somewhat limited. Aside from the iPod and the Zune (Microsoft’s version), there aren’t a whole lot of players out there. The alternatives that do exist cost about the same.

With flash memory-based players, with hard drives on the order of 4 or 8 GB, options are a little wider. Making a splash is the SanDisk Sansa brand. These are pretty straightforward players that boast a few extra features over the iPod, like FM radio and the ability to record.

The second biggest advantage the player I bought is that it operates on an open system. That means that the manufacturer doesn’t attempt to shackle you to its own media player and music store, like Apple and Microsoft do. You’re free to dump whatever music you want onto the player, provided it doesn’t have digital rights management. You don’t have to use iTunes (side rant: the Apple iEverything product names strike me as pretentious and annoying, if highly successful) or Windows Media Player or anything else.

The biggest advantage to the View I bought is its price. The MSRP for this player is a good $50 less than the equivalent iPod nano, and its features are equivalent or better in nearly every category.

So in the realm of flash players, there are undoubtedly cheaper and better alternatives to the iPod.

However, as I mentioned that is not necessarily the case when it comes to hard drive players. The iPod may very well be the best choice in this arena, and if it’s not the Zune probably is. If you’re okay with the closed system these giants provide, here mainstream looks to be the way to go.