iAm. Therefore, iEgocast.

This last Saturday, The Trader Joe's in San Francisco's South of Market was filled with three types of people:

1) Those with mobile phone headpieces talking loudly about future corrective surgery plans as they checked the ripeness of mangos.
2) Those with iPods on avoiding the phone people and knowingly thinking to themselves how "OK Computer" is so ironic when engaging in a consumerist orgy.
3) Those with ever-rising blood pressures who bounced and navigated between the talkers and listeners.

In the Sunday NYT Reader section, the iPodded shoppers are explored.  The short piece notes that the latest issue of New Atlantis magazine studies "The Age of Egocasting", in an exploration of the growing trend toward customized, personalized entertainment.  The New Atlantis notes:

With the advent of TiVo and iPod, however, we have moved beyond narrowcasting into “egocasting”—a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear. We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy. As sociologists Walker and Bellamy have noted, “media audiences are seen as frequently selecting material that confirms their beliefs, values, and attitudes, while rejecting media content that conflicts with these cognitions.” Technologies like TiVo and iPod enable unprecedented degrees of selective avoidance. The more control we can exercise over what we see and hear, the less prepared we are to be surprised. It is no coincidence that we impute God-like powers to our technologies of personalization (TiVo, iPod) that we would never impute to gate-keeping technologies. No one ever referred to Caller ID as “Jehovah’s Secretary.”

The New Atlantis and Times piece both note that: in a February 2004 interview with Wired News, Michael Bull, who teaches at the University of Sussex, writes extensively about portable music devices and is dubbed "Professor iPod", argued,

"People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction.... That can't be understated - it gives them a lot of pleasure." Those people with white wires dangling from their ears might be enjoying their unique life soundtrack, but they are also practicing "absent presence" in public spaces, paying little or no attention to the world immediately around them.

University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein describes a world where

"you need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less."

So, no wonder, the iPodders keep bumping into others as they hum along with Bjork.

But, there are even deeper dangers to living in your own Egocasted world...  From Corante...

Only in New York: the iPod subway mugging. In some parts of the city, the number of students who have been the victims of iPod robberies on the subways in recent months has almost doubled. In one neighborhood of Brooklyn, NYC transit cops even distributed fliers offering to engrave students' iPods and cellphones with ID numbers.

Finally, one does wonder if this is really the beginning of something new or is it just this year's model?  Is "Egocasting" 2005's Pointcast? Will this rise of iPod's, Blogs, and RSS unleash the Web's true potential? Will these trends signal the disintermediation of media class? Or will the search engines, like Google, become the Shepard -- and will firms such as Efficient Frontier become the sheep dogs that guide us away from what we want -- to what their customers want?

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The pronunciation Jehovah is believed to have arisen through the introduction of vowels of the qere—the marginal notation used by the Masoretes. In places where the consonants of the text to be read(the qere) differed from the consonants of the written text(the kethib), they wrote the qere in the margin to indicate the desired reading. In such cases, the kethib was read using the vowels of the qere. For a few very frequent words the marginal note was omitted, referred to as q're perpetuum. One of these frequent cases was God's name, which was not to be pronounced in fear of profaning the "ineffable name".

[Ootsuki]

Hook your iPod up to your computer and when the scnenar/camera wizzard pops up, select the photos you want to get rid of, click next, check the box labbled delete selected photos from my camera after coppied' and put in a name (remember the name) and click next. When the photos are done loading and deleting, click finish. a window will pop up that shows them. They are no longer on your ipod but on your computer. However, you can delete them from your computer by going to my computer and finding the photos and pressing delete.OR go on your iPod and go to saved photos and find the photo(s) you want to get rid of and press the trash can icon. You will be asked weather or not you want to delete them. you must choose yes or no.OR . if there in your photo library, open up the photos tab and uncheck the box labled sync photos' then click apply or syncGood Luck!

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