Technology That Can Read Your Mind
New technology sometimes brings out my cantankerous side.
Back in my day, you used to have to buy whole albums if you liked a particular song that wasn’t released as a single. Albums came on these plastic discs called CDs, and to play them on the go you had to have a device called a Walkman that was a whole 8 inches in diameter. If you heard a song you liked and didn’t know the title or artist, you were never, ever going to find it again to listen to.
Back then, radio was low-def and loaded with commercials. You could pick your genre of music (maybe) by choosing one of a dozen stations on your dial, but then you were at the mercy of the DJ’s particular tastes.
When you got in your car and drove down to your local Blockbuster, you had to walk through a sea of DVD releases, loosely grouped by genre. Maybe you had a friendly clerk who go to know your tastes over time and could recommend other movies he thought you’d like — but maybe you didn’t.
Fast forward — what, five years? NetFlix has a now-famous patent on a proprietary algorithm that takes your past movie ratings, compares them to other users with similar tastes, and makes frighteningly good recommendations for what to watch. Not only does Netflix pick my movies for me, it has them waiting for me when I get home from work — so that even before I consciously think “You know, I’d like to watch a new movie tonight,” one is already in my hand.
Pandora was next, redefining radio. In fact, Pandora is so far from traditional radio, we probably should come up with a new word for it. Suddenly I can create my own radio Pandora stations based on a song or an artist I already know and like, and Pandora will play me other music that I don’t even know I like yet. Pandora knows you better than you know yourself.
The latest, greatest step in the evolution of mind-reading technology, hands down, is Shazam. Hold up your phone in a club, or in the car, or to your TV during a commercial — any time you hear a song you don’t know, Shazam will listen for a few seconds and tell you what it is. If you’re using Shazam on the iPhone you can then click through and purchase the song immediately through iTunes — now you own that song you couldn’t even name 30 seconds ago.
WHAT??! Where was this ten years ago when I was just discovering my passion for ’70s funk standards that get radio play about once a year (now you know something about my taste in music — but still not as much as Pandora does).
Media consumption now is cross-platform, on-demand, and fully customized to your individual tastes. Kids nowadays are growing up in a world where they will never have to worry about finding new music or movie suggestions, sitting through commercials on television (Tivo is a topic for another post), or tracking down an unknown song they like.
Every generation likes to think that it was character-building to have faced all the challenges that technology overcomes automatically for subsequent generations, but maybe it just makes us bitter. Then again, it’s hard to stay bitter for long while you’re grooving to a commercial-free Kool & The Gang Pandora station, knowing that an obscure indie film you’d never heard of (but are almost guaranteed to love) is on its way to your doorstep.
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[...] Social Media Innovation placed an interesting blog post on Technology That Can Read Your MindHere’s a brief overview If you’re using Shazam on the iPhone you can then click through and purchase the song immediately through iTunes —… [...]
Jamie – I couldn’t agree more with you about the on-demand nature of media (and it’s only going to become moreso). Loved chatting about this with you the other evening. Here was my “Holy ____” moment when I was first shown Shazam: http://tinyurl.com/63q5yk