Enhanced awareness and Life in the Bubble

It's funny how you don't notice something until you start thinking about it yourself, or, conversely, once you are in the market for something or pondering something you begin to see it everywhere. For example, you never notice how many laptops there are about the place until you are looking to buy one yourself, and then you see them everywhere. Or you never notice how many pregnant people there are in the shops until someone in your family is pregnant. Or you suddenly start to see how many 4WDs there are on the road when you are looking at buying one.

Something like that happened to me this morning. I read an article in the Dallas Morning News today that said this:

"Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble."

And then, while walking around in the city this morning from the train to my office, it seemed that every 3rd person had white wires trailing down from their ears, locked inside their MP3 cocoon. I'd never seen so many people with earphones before.

Of course I must admit that it wasn't just the Dallas Morning News article that made me so acutely aware of the iPodders, it was more the fact that I myself was amongst them, white wires leading from my ears down to that magical white device in my bag, surrounded by people, but in my own little bubble of private sound. And I felt a strange sense of kindred with those other coccooned ones as well, knowing that we shared the same experience of isolation in public - very weird.

[Currently playing on my IPod: Vertigo by U2]