Multi-Tasking

I've recently found myself wanting to occupy every single bloody thing I do with music. More to the point, I want to clip my iPod shuffle to a loop on my belt and insert the little white headphones in my ears to experience tunes as varied as 'She sells sanctuary' to 'Mein Hers Brennt'. The other day I found myself eating dinner and drinking a pint of water, a daily mundane task. I felt a panic, for some reason I felt uneasy. Where was my iPod? Was I currently occupying all of my senses? Add to that the growing urge to plonk my laptop on my lap and gormlessly shove my mind through the info trough that is the net and you have the symptoms of the modern first world person.

It's the beginning of the climax of Apples marketing campaign. It started modestly with the Mac and went through various incarnations until it thundered into religious territory with the introduction of the iPod. The money spending world is hooking up to ipods. We are uploading an ever growing percentage of our lives to social networking sites, posting inane thoughts on Twitter, just because we can. The world is past being a small place. You only have to log onto Facebook to see how the method of how someone posted a comment to the site is displayed in sleek grey type underneath. How many time have you seen 'comment posted via text' or, and this is the one we all love to hate, 'comment posted via iPhone'. Who doesn't think 'tosser' when they see that? I know I do. Or see two people having lunch and one of them has a blackberry sitting on the table and their eyes guiltily divert to its screen every 3.24 seconds to scan for a new message or whatever the hell blackberrys get. Hell, just having a mobile on me stresses me out to the point that I throw it in my backpack whenever I can. Otherwise I'd just be looking at its screen over and over again or convincing myself it vibrated and I missed it.

As a species we don't have much to recommend us. We are vain, violent, cowardly and insecure. All these gadgets are 'reassurance' devices. Check the screen of your phone. If you have a message, you are wanted, popular even. If not then your black insecure egotistical withered heart might just skip that next beat (which is scheduled for two in the next hour). Then again you can always check your phone in four seconds time.

All these accessible means of reaching the ever expanding single consciousness that is the internet just provide more and more ways for us to feed large organisations who are constantly rabbiting away on new products for us based on the ridiculous mountain of unknowingly insightful opinions we post each day. The human race is being meticulously trained to be the factory line worker of the future, with technological multi-tasking as second nature. Give it fifty years, we'll all be able to phase out of consciousness and log into our augmented cranial hard drive to catalogue our thoughts for the last 60 seconds, and the scary thing is we will not think it strange.

All this busy busy, do this, update that hype tends to send me in the opposite direction. I own a bog standard Nokia phone. Yet I also own an iPod shuffle and a Macbook. And now I have just finished my little piece and, true to my species stereotype, I want to get feedback and reassurance. So here I go, I am uploading it to my blog. I might as well contact the shady human behavioural experts who sit in a darkened room in front of a trillion screens and monitor the Internet, and hand it to them myself with interesting little footnotes scrawled in the margins. But hey, that might mean they comment on my blog.....actually I might just do that.