I was talking to a teenager today. That’s right, an actual youth of Broken Britain. It wasn’t as terrifying an experience as you might have thought though. For starters, he didn’t speak in that bizarre faux-patois accent that Young White Middle Englanders seem to have adopted, and so I was able to understand him enough to use the usual line of questioning I follow with anybody under 25 that I meet these days. Questions about school, pop stars, films and, since the project I did with Max Gadney about ‘Young People and News’ some years ago, about the internet. It turned out this particular youngster wasn’t as enamored with Facebook and the social media revolution as case studies frequently suggest. It didn’t seem to bother him that much. In fact, neither did films or pop stars despite my suggesting all the really cool and violent ones he should perhaps ‘Google’. If he actually used the internet at all. Anyway, none of this is really helping my point. I wanted to talk about young people who are keen internet users and Facebook status updaters. The conversation with young Jake really served no purpose other than it got me thinking about what I’d be like now as a teenager, and how I’d get in all kinds of trouble based on stuff I write on the internet.

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Obviously Spotify is fantastic. It’s the future of music, right? In five years time we’ll find the idea of a well maintained iTunes collection archaic, surely. Transferring ‘files’ so that we can all fill huge hard drives stacked full of exactly the same music. Plus you have to double up, so that you can carry a copy of some of that collection to listen to on a bus. That sounds just like a super-capacity Minidisc player, Grandad. Why bother? If you can access anything, from anywhere, why own anything? Well, maybe there’s more to well categorised music collections than just the listening. As vain as we are these days, are we ready to give up the ownership of the media we consume?

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