On my way to the library today in Stuttgart, I had a weird epiphany.
In my daily commute I usually have my iPod Touch constantly attached to me like a limb. The number of people who have their ears plugged with some form of mp3 player is increasing. Though a surprising number of people still read real books here, out in the trains, on park benches, in their balconies and hopefully in the privacy of their homes.
Today, I just felt like glancing around to see how many people on board were such specimen. And I wasn’t shocked but the entire compartment (approximately 40 people) had their ears stuffed with the white Apple ear buds, the iPod/iPhone ones. Some of them were listening to music and reading at the same time. I wonder what exactly were they concentrating on.
I had a severe temptation of clicking a picture but such a high-tech crowd might be more cautious about privacy and not prefer a photograph published on the net without their permissions.
Picture or no picture, people from a variety of nationalities, age and aims had this thing in common. They all had a thin white thread connecting them, literally. They’d all bitten the ‘apple’ of knowledge…errr…music..errr… audio book of Billy Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods in my case. Technology does bring us on common ground, sometimes in really weird ways…