An article in Salon explains the worry with the iPod.

Pure process is a powerful drug; it swallows up experience. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger anticipated this problem 57 years ago in a bleak essay titled "The Question Concerning Technology." I'm far from certain that I understand him correctly -- reading the cryptic old Nazi is like taking a Germanic, footnoted acid trip -- but Heidegger seems to argue that technology is not merely a neutral tool, but is a kind of coercion over and shrinking of the world, a process he called "enframing." By framing the world through technology, man is losing touch with it.

We can illustrate Heidegger's point with a humble example: the iPod. As Farhad Manjoo pointed out in these pages, the blessing of the iPod, the fact that it allows you to draw on a vast musical library, is also its curse. The more choices you have to create the perfect soundtrack for your life, the jumpier and more uncertain you can become that you've made the right choice. As Manjoo writes, "Am I the only one who worries that for all its wonders, the iPod has also tremendously complicated our relationship to music -- has made us more mindlessly consumptive of songs, less attentive to the context and the quality of music, and concerned, constantly, with just always getting more, more, more?" Heidegger would have scoffed at the idea of writing a sentence this succinct, but it's the same idea.

Having problems choosing what music product to consume? Pull out the ear buds and listen to the world.  ¶ 9:01 AM