Why Doesn’t New Technology Feel Comfortable Anymore?

An ode to the senses

Erik P.M. Vermeulen, PhD
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Photo courtesy of author

What, if anything, do you remember about 1999?

Endless discussions about the Millennium bug and our computers not being able to work. Or the dot-com bubble?

When I think of 1999, I think of music.

Napster — the peer-to-peer file-sharing network — changed everything. Suddenly it wasn’t necessary to buy a whole album for that one great song I heard on the radio. Now, I could use Napster to download any song I wanted.

Of course, the system wasn’t flawless. It took a long time — sometimes very long — to download a song. A phone call would disconnect me from the service and I had to start all over again. And I ran the risk of downloading a virus as well. But the service was free and provided access to an unimaginable library of music.

It was the start of a new era. And when Steve Jobs announced the iPod, it didn’t take long for me to digitize and store all my music on a virtual jukebox. Now I had access to thousands of high-quality songs wherever I went. I wasn’t forced to go out to Sam Goody or Tower Records and buy the albums of my favorite bands and manually copy the best tracks to a cassette tape or CD.

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