Filling Up The Room

It didn't take me very long to decide on which medium to write about first. One might assume it would be facebook since it's currently tempting me to switch browser screens. But no, I chose iTunes. How could I not? I have it running right now, it's filling up the room...it's kind of hard to ignore. That's what's great about it too; you can use it while you pretty much do anything. Doing homework, exercising, hanging out with friends, whatever you're doing you can have your music playing in the background. But does iTunes have any cultural importance? Obviously it does. It pretty much defines the innovation and advancement of our generation. iTunes has really made the music industry step its game up. Even though record labels have been freaking out about piracy and artists have lost a significant amount of sales because of it, iTunes has also been putting a pressure on them to produce more music. When you think about it, before iTunes, people relied on CDs. Now that we can put all our music together and change the album and artist with just a push of a button means that we are listening to music more often. Furthermore, we are able to pick and choose different songs that we like; we don’t have to buy the entire album. iTunes has also made our society more social. While some may argue that listening to so much music replaces time when people would be talking to others, I believe instead that iTunes has created a whole new way of communicating with others. It serves as a device to connect different people with a common thread, music. Even looking at iTunes now, I can see that I can listen to my friend’s iTunes library who is sitting in a different dorm from me right now. That’s a connection that could never have been made through CD players.

The use of iTunes can be connected to ideology in media. Musical artists can use iTunes to get a message across about society that could reach a vast audience, and they can do so in such a subtle way. iTunes even categorizes these different ideologies for you, by categorizing your music into different genres. A bunch of punk bands probably have a similar ideology about our society, but one that is vastly different from Pop music, which will be completely different to Rap. iTunes has the ability to take different ideologies from different parts of the world, and put them all next to each other in groups on one screen. Again, this is something that would be more difficult to do in years past before the existence of iTunes.