Dawn of a new era

I have recently acquired myself a portable MP3 player and am finding that I may never see my senses in the same light again. My world has been transformed by the ability to control the inputs that my body’s senses are bombarded with daily.

I propose being able to choose what you see but not what you hear has been one of the leading factors preventing ears attaining the level of popularity that eyes have held for the past million years or so. There are, of course, those who would have you believe that sight’s rise to fame was due to our eyes ability to interpret various wave lengths of light as the myriad of colours (16 Million at last count) we all ooh and aah at during sunsets and other such beautiful and emotive scenes. Or, for the less optimistic, those that believe its popularity stems from the fact that they mostly help us avoid stubbing toes and stepping out in front of the occasional passing bus. And all though these are both valid arguments they just don’t happen to be completely right.

Imagine if you will in years gone by when man still lived in caved dwellings and relied on instinct for survival. Surely at no other time were our senses of more importance to us than then and yet this was seemingly the beginning of the ears demise. Not because we couldn’t hear a sabre tooth sneaking up on us (they were stealthy buggers) or because you didn’t always hear your mom calling you at a crucial moment in a game of pre-historic ching chong cha (a.k.a rock, boulder, pebble). But because of what we couldn’t help hearing. As all abodes where single “room” affairs children were forced to endure the sounds of the old man banging the misses head against the old head board, or cave wall in poorer families. With no pillows to cover their ears we developed into a species embarrassed and confused about sexuality and the act of procreation. And a host of other disorders too numerous to mention. We need only examine the Dutch Reformed or the Catholic Church to see how that came to affect us. And so the ear became a second class sense, something we couldn’t control to our liking.

But now our ears can fight back. We still can’t close them or swivel them to avert an unpleasant sound but we can now plug into a library of music (legally purchased of course) and select an appropriate theme track for our lives. Track selection may be influenced by things such as cloud cover (the meteorological and cranial variety), number of hours sleep, days left till the weekend or general mojo levels. The sound of annoying kids and arguing chavs (those would be the dodgy pikey like buggers wearing tracksuits and peroxided hair) fade into oblivion by the liberal use of the volume control.

Now whether this will only fuel our current tendencies to excommunicate our fellow man and perpetuate the circumstance of which it has been said helps terrorist carry out attacks in our big cites, I don’t know.

What I do know is now I plug in and the world around me becomes a sphere of sound and emotion specifically designed for the comfort of, arguably the most important person in my universe…me!