Thing 7: Talk about Technology

I always seem to be one of the last to get up to date with technology. I still do not own a cell phone nor do I have plans to get one soon. It's not that I don't like technology, I just don't always see the need to have the "latest and greatest." It took me years to finally purchase a DVD player. The rise of the Mp3 was pretty fascinating to me simply because I never thought it would catch on. Now with the invention of high-capacity Mp3 players, I-tunes, and websites like MySpace (where one can post Mp3s of their own music)it is now the dominant form of music. The idea of buying songs individually seemed ludicrous to me-- all until my wife and I were moving from the West coast to the East coast and she bought an I-pod to bring along on the drive so that we wouldn't run out of good music to listen to along the way. Now I am an Mp3 convert, and I even occasionally buy songs from Itunes. I like having access to my entire music collection on one small device. As a musician I often need to reference music from my collection to learn new material and with an Mp3 player I don't have to sort through a large book of CD's any more or change CD's constantly when comparing one player's style to another's.

I then learned that I could convert many of my own field recordings to Mp3 and then catalog them and download to an Mp3 player. Some old-time musicians like myself often travel around with a recording MiniDisc player-- antiquated technology by today's standards-- and record other musicians to learn one of their tunes in the future or to learn their style of playing. I plug the minidisc into my computer and record the music in Mp3 format. I'm still looking for an Mp3 player with a mic input that will allow me to record directly to it. Some people I know have managed to create a modestly priced home recording studio and have done self-produced albums, but that is getting off-topic.

I guess my point is that new technologies have benefits for even the most cynical folks (like myself) who don't always immediately embrace the latest and greatest gadgets. I think about how my parents used to tell me when I was a child that they grew up without television. At the time that blew my mind. In the future I imagine telling my children (don't actually have any yet)that I grew up without the invention known as the Internet and seeing their eyes grow wide with surprise and disbelief.