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Popular Culture Review
much of a statement of character and “belonging” as it was an economic
commitment.’ Today, when a song eosts a dollar when it is purchased
legally (and is free otherwise), and a 5th-generation 64 GB iPod-touch
holds more than 31,000 songs, it is hard to find one’s identity. If you
went to a restaurant and they had 31,000 different dishes on the menu, it
would be diffieult to say what sort of restaurant this would be: what kind
of decor would such a restaurant have? What sort of flatware would best
fit it? Everything and nothing? The stakes are low in terms of
establishing restaurant identity, but when we are talking about your own
inability to perform your own personal identity, it gets trickier. This is an
ontological problem, though it is also essentially a problem of values.
And the particular crisis here is rooted in the blind acceptance of
technology.
It would have been difficult to predict twenty-five years ago that
as a culture we would have chosen the value of music’s portability over
its quality. But perhaps this is because we never really chose these
values