Last month, as I rode the bus to work, I looked at all the people on the bus who had headphones on and wondered what they were hearing while rest of us listened to the rumbling of traffic and the chirping of crosswalk lights. Were they listening to music? The news? Podcasts? How many of them were listening to the same thing?
It struck me as curious that we share music all the time online, but we don’t do it in person unless it’s being broadcast in a public space. What happened to all the sharing and caring that had been instilled into us in kindergarden? And, if we can share everything from our photos and bookmarks to our goals and even our lives online, why can’t we do it in person?
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how well people would respond to face-to-face music sharing. So last month, I borrowed Kat Siddle’s (DiSCORDER magazine’s editor) iPod (meta-sharing, ha) and stuck it in the faces of 39 perfect Vancouver strangers.
If you were waiting for the shameless self-promotion, here it is: you can read about the Great iPod Experiment in this month’s paper issue of DiSCORDER magazine. And hopefully on the website one day, if I ever finish the wp theme. Hm. Maybe I’ll just post it here when I get my grubby paws on the edited print version.
I think I’m going to keep sharing my music with strangers. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope more people do it - the only thing you need is a music player, 2 sets of headphones, and a headphone jack splitter (less than $10 at any electronics store). It was really great to see someone I didn’t even know smile, even after they’d had a long day at work. We didn’t even talk much. We just listened to the music.
(Oh, I also took some photos of chairs for this issue. We didn’t end up using them, but if you live in Vancouver and you haven’t seen the chairs on the beach near Burrard, go and see them. They’re really wonderful.)