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The iPod Junkie of the 21st century. Are you one of them? I know I am. But let me tell you this, there is a whole lot you and I miss out on when we have all of that wonderful music bringing the jive into our daily routines. I know from experience. I tried putting the old iPod down for a week once.

At this current time of my life I was at school in Philadelphia studying Film and Video. And like most college students when I was on my way to anywhere, class, lunch, a friends place, I was listening to my best friend the iPod. Then one week during the spring semester I started to notice how often I was actually listening to my iPod and started to wonder if it was having an effect on my perception of the world. So, in what I considered a scientific experiment at the time, I decided for the next week I would not listen to my iPod.

The first few days were honestly really, really hard. I had so much trouble not putting the iPod into my ears. It had become such a necessity to my ears that I almost could not go without it. I made a mental note of this because no one should be that attached to a music player or anything for that matter.

By the third day I started to notice something though. After I had gotten past the fact I could not listen to my favorite songs at will I began to notice the music of the world. I began to notice that the cars, the trees, the wind, the animals, they all had their own songs as well. This was actually a frightening experience. I really was worried that I had been missing out on reality and had been stuck inside some sort of "bubble."

Towards the end of the week I started to enjoy the natural sounds of the world even more and told my self I should definitely not listen to my iPod as much. Not only was I missing out on reality, I was really putting myself into a "bubble." There is no way to calculate how much an iPod separates one from the world, but after this experiment I had no doubt that others and myself were walking around campus in our "glass bubbles" of music. No matter how entertaining our songs may be, there is a lot of the real world we miss out on when those ear buds are sitting so commonly in our ears.

Learn more about this author, Noah Rubeling-Kain.
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