EPPC Fellow Christine Rosen discusses the impact of TiVo, iPod, and other personalized entertainment technologies in this recent interview with the editor of the online magazine Godspy. She discusses the trends described in her recent essay "The Age of Egocasting" in EPPC's journal The New Atlantis. An excerpt of the interview follows.

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Were there experiences in your own life that led to your current critique of personal technology?

I've been struck by the transformation of social space in recent years and how technologies such as cell phones, iPods, portable DVD players, and the like have allowed us to create little digital cocoons for ourselves. I've seen this on airplanes, trains, buses, and in waiting rooms—and I've seen it increase exponentially in the past ten years. As a result, I think we're seeing a concomitant erosion of civility in public space. Even walking down the sidewalk, people are often on the phone, listening to music—and basically they have removed themselves from the space mentally, but not physically.

In your article you talked about "absent presence." What exactly did you mean by that?

Broadly speaking, "absent presence" means being physically in a space but absent mentally from what is going on around you. Sociologists such as Erving Goffman in the 1950s studied the unspoken rules of social behavior in public space and what happens when people violate them. Cell phones and iPods encourage absent presence because they send a very clear message to those around you: I'm unavailable. This violates those unspoken rules and the expectations we all have about behavior in public space. Today, our technologies enable us to shut others out but also, in the case of cell phones, to impose our one-sided conversations on others in a way that we haven't been able to do in previous eras.

You also talked about how more and more we experience culture in a "mediated" way, which doesn't bode well for our culture. But how would you try to convince someone not to download a free symphony for his iPod in a matter of minutes, and instead spend the time, money, and effort to go to a real symphony?

I wouldn't. I would tell someone to download the symphony and make an effort to hear it performed live by professional musicians. The instant gratification of listening to the iPod symphony is not bad in and of itself. But the time, effort, and money expended to hear that same symphony performed live will, I think, lead to a different kind of appreciation for the music. [read more]