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I grew up collecting records and CD's from a very early age. In school, I was always the guy who people asked about new music, what was good, what I liked, and I developed that reputation among my social core.

At the same time, I started using computers long before home CD burners and the internet existed, an era in which society considered "computer geeks" to be loners and outcasts. Even then, I discovered a network of other computer people who shared my passion for both music and technology.

What a queer kind of dichotomy for a young person: searching for a connection to the world and a means of self-expression through two diametrically-opposed means. Little did I know that I was living on the fault line of the digital age; within 15 short years people, millions of music fans would be able to stop whispering the names of their favorite bands to their friends and start sharing their entire music catalogs across continents.

By mere virtue of my precocious interests, I look back at both of these interests as a plea for socialization. But how does that translate into our modern high-speed, high-tech world? To me, at least, the convenience factor of downloading or trading MP3's has never decreased this social connectivity; in fact, I can see how it has increased my ability to break down barriers of interpersonal relationships through a series of technology solutions.

It's no accident that the marriage of music and technology have created content for vast social networks like MySpace Music, where music fans and artists can connect with each other in great frequency. Other social networks like MOG, imeem, and many others based on music have begun to spring up everywhere as a result of the connectivity people develop through the shared experiences that music provides to active listeners.

Like any culture, the tech-music culture has its share of people who are merely collectors, searching for files and ordering them neatly as a means to their own obsessive-compulsive behavior. However, this clearly is not the norm. Does the ability to connect people to vast and differing cultural waves of music instantly seem like a lonely journey? By virtue of the instruments, it seems to me that the loner has been dragged out of the shadows to be joined by so many who share his or her interests.

Learn more about this author, E.J. Friedman.
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