I am sitting in the coffeehouse that I sit in most days of the week. I come here to read and write, but mostly to read and write in the company of strangers, for I could read and write at home if I wanted. Usually I don’t wear headphones but occasionally, and especially when there are loud conversations that I want to listen to, I do.
Today I wear headphones to drown out the three gentlemen who are talking loudly about computers and business plans. And I don’t know why, but I can’t keep myself from listening. So I force myself to wear headphones and scroll through iTunes. And then I see names in the iTunes sidebar that do not belong. I see names I have never heard of, personalized names like, “Listen Bitch!” and first names like, “Lance.”
I did not ask for them but here they are. I see that they are listed in a folder called “Shared” and so I quickly understand that they are the names of the digital music collections of other people somewhere in this coffeehouse. And I feel odd that I can so easily access them. I look around to see if anyone is watching and then click on the name of a stranger’s collection. I feel like an intruder peaking at the collections of others but select a track and listen anyway because I need to know that this is real, and it is, and it disappoints me. It doesn’t shock me. Technology has already far surpassed the ability to wirelessly share information. But it disturbs to see personal music collections this way.
It disturbs me to find that these collections hardly look different from mine. I could scroll through a stranger’s collection and almost forget that it is not my own. I could forget what I do and do not own. I could forget to care about what I do and do not own. I could forget to care that any of this music matters. These anonymous collections are just names and titles and numbers and fonts on computers. They are but bits of information floating through the air of the coffeehouse and I am but a semaphore picking up signals.
Collections were at one time, for some, a personal matter—they weren’t for just anyone to peruse, let alone share. And today they are floating around the air inside this coffeehouse. I look at them and think that maybe they are signs of a new willingness to share, and to expose without hesitation, and to set our lives free from the confines of the physical. Maybe they are examples of us transcending our old inhabited ways of living so that we may exist on a plane of openness and connectivity.
And then I click on the collection of a stranger, someone sitting at a table with a laptop somewhere nearby, and begin to scroll and click and listen and wonder whose music this is. I look around and guess to myself. I decide that it must be the fellow at the table to my left. I think about asking him, which would turn him into a stranger no more. I imagine the two of us sharing a great conversation about music. I imagine us discussing the contents of our collections. I imagine one of us turning the other on to a new artist.
I picture this while staring at the stranger’s music on my computer. I can’t bring myself to look up from the screen and ask. Clearly, we’re on the same grid and we even like some of the same music, but I still can’t talk to his face. From the corner of my eye, I see him pack his laptop and take a last sip of coffee. I look back at my iTunes and see the name, his name I think, no longer there. I watch the stranger walk out the door, with the particles of his collection following close behind.
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