编者按: Is There Anybody Alive Out There?

On Patton Oswalt’s new album, the frequently filthy, occasionally brilliant, 和 always hilarious 狼人和棒棒糖, the comedian comments on a news item about the record being set for the oldest woman to give birth with a simple summation of science gone too far: "都是关于可能，而不是应该."

Not a week goes by that my email inbox isn’t graced with at least one announcement of some unique, 创新, 和 utterly useless example of the latest application for streaming media—like the one for a new site featuring user-generated weather reports. I’m not particularly interested in what the skies are looking like over Chip’s house in Secaucus, 和 can’t think of any other compelling purpose for such a site. 都是关于可能，而不是应该.

不用说, 我并不反对科技, 和, 不管怎样, Oswalt makes clear that he’s not some reactionary, 反科学的螺母. But there are times when we—as technology users, 内容创造者, 和 consumers—ought to interrogate our own motives 和 ask ourselves about the implications of doing things just because they’re cool, 或者仅仅因为我们有这个能力.

What made me think of all this was when a friend of mine passed along a copy of the new Bruce Springsteen album, 魔法, after it leaked nearly a month before its official release date earlier this week. (Don’t you love how we’ve been conditioned to say an album or movie "leaked," as if it somehow managed to trickle out through a crack in the studio walls under its own power?)到第二天早上, it was all over the various pirate download sites, 当然, 还有新的喷火战机乐队, 坎耶·维斯特, 及50分.

我没有把它放在那里, 我的朋友也没有, who knows enough of the "right people" that he likely got his copy somewhere considerably less public (if no more legal) than The Pirate Bay. 我确实听了, 我承认, but a funny thing happened: My excitement over hearing the new work by my favorite artist was quickly joined by a sense of disappointment 和, 不要太浪漫, 损失.

每个星期二, known as "New Release Day" to entertainment geeks long before iTunes co-opted the term for its marketing emails, my office mate 和 I would ask each other "You buyin’ anything today?" We both still buy a tremendous amount of music, 和 neither of us frequent the torrent sites ourselves, but by the time New Release Day rolls around, we’ve more often than not heard the albums already. 所以我们去唱片店的时候, we’re buying the packaging 和 better sound quality—thank goodness for that—but we’re not filled with the same sense of excitement 和 anticipation we once were.

Nor are we participating the way we used to in a shared event. 真见鬼, 回到大学时代, buddies 和 I would line up in front of the Exclusive Company on State Street in Madison at 11:30 on Monday nights before New Release Day, 和 pick up the latest Guns N’Roses or U2 or Springsteen at roughly 12:03 a.m.和其他几十人一起. 这是公共的东西, 而且通常情况下, we’d take the new releases back to somebody’s house 和 listen to them together when we should have been studying, 或者至少是睡觉.

As more 和 more content is available online—legitimately or not—more 和 more of us are watching or listening to it in solitude. We don’t need to go to the movie theater, 记录存储, or even congregate at the same time as everyone else in the country to watch the 黑道家族》 finale—even that brought with it a feeling of participation in a shared, communal event. It’ll be available on-dem和 the next day, anyway.

Neither are the enterprise nor the academy immune from the on-going, 增加经验的原子化. 接受训练的能力, 观看CEO信息, 或者在家里上一门课也很棒, 和 brings with it far more positives than negatives. But the negatives include a fairly significant one: We’re no longer as freqently gathering in public places, sharing experiences 和 (more importantly) each other’s presence.

这并不是说流媒体视频, 时间和位置移动装置, or mobile access to content are inherently bad things, nor is it to argue that the onus for sharing an experience falls on anyone but the participants. Nor is it to say that technology hasn’t created communities where none previously existed; heck, I first met the guy who gave me the Springsteen album on a newsgroup, 和 have forged many other deep friendships that way. But they never feel truly real until we meet in person.

我是不是该等一等再听 魔法? 我不知道我会不会走那么远. 但当我听到“无处广播。,这是专辑的第一首单曲, I can’t help but hear a painful irony in the song’s chorus: "Is there anybody alive out there?"