Yesterday, as I headed home on the subway, I realized that every single person around me was plugged in. It is normal that the vast majority of commuters are plugged in, but maybe because there were less commuters at that late hour, the percentage of people within earshot of me who were entirely absorbed in their own iPod world was 100%.
Normally, people wearing headphones aren't entirely deaf, of course, but the mechanical sounds of the train block out anything else my neighbors could possibly hear. So I realized that I could sing out loud on the subway car, because, aurally-defined, it was my private car.
One-way input, with no response, is essentially private activity, right? The irony is, music practice rooms anywhere are never sound proof, so were I singing where I should have been singing, more passersby would have heard me.
Which got me to thinking that, in the future, when everyone is able to log on to some virtual world (or maybe the same meta virtual world) while commuting, no one will interact with their physical neighbors anymore. After all, connectivity puts you in touch with your buddies and your loved ones, with exciting news and entertainment; whatever experience you could derive from interacting with your neighbors can't really compete with that. Public space will be silent and lifeless. It kind of already is.
We need to fix that. The problem is not that virtual worlds are bad; we just need to start mixing things a bit, and start enabling horizontal networking...?
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