Just a Gwai Lo

Clive Thompson on personal digital music players and the conservatives that hate them: “The whole point behind the personal audioplayer is that it provides a new aesthetic dimension to an already-aesthetic experience: Looking at the world around you. Conservatives fret that the white-earbud-sporting masses are simply tuning out and ignoring everything around them. But just as often, I suspect, a soundtrack actually makes you more engaged with the world around you: You notice stuff in new ways because of the emotions the music evokes.”