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?

From the actual collecting of vinyl and CDs, to keeping ticket stubs of movies, we find ways to document the films and music that meant something to us. Young men, as shown by the archetypal snobbish vinyl collector in High Fidelity, are obsessed with showing their worth through meticulously arranged shelves of aging paper and plastic. We hope that people will visit our cultural playpens, these museums of one’s self, and judge our worth accordingly. If it’s sweet talking that’ll get get a girl back to your flat, it’s your original Smiths seven inches that’ll convince her to stay the weekend. Or that’s the theory.

It’s one thing to ‘live in the now’, and to enjoy an experience, but once that’s gone what have you got? If it’s a gig, probably beer in your hair. If it was a film, possibly some popcorn stuck in your teeth. You could say it enriches the soul, broadens your horizon, that culture can expand your mind, and allows us to learn. But we’re not patient enough to wait for the long term benefits these films, books, music and art promise. We want immediate recognition and feedback from any time we’ve invested, wearing a badge for every experience we’ve had.

So thank goodness systems like Spotify have come about to shake us out of our selfish badge-wearing ways. Music is free, but it’s also never owned by anyone. No-one shows off on the internet. It’s all about sharing, not ownership, right? Poppycock, of course. What are blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc other than a sliding scale on which to express our vanity. Either you’re showing off about your cultural activities of a weekend, or you’re putting up that picture of your girlfriend who’s way hotter than ANY chick ANY of those IDIOTS at school go out with.

Now rather than exciting band album titles adorning our Billy book shelves, we have Last.FM and the culture of Scrobbling. Not only can we see a list of music you own, but the frequency of your listening to it. You can literally compare your tastes with your peers, without even having to visit their home! A weekly chart of your most consumed bands can be announced from your Twitter feed every Sunday. You literally are Top of the Pops.

I’ve gotten greedy though, and want more things I hear to be scrobbled. Surely there are times in my life when the songs I’m listening to aren’t coming from iTunes or Spotify. I want Shazam to recognise songs played on the radio, or in the car, and add them to my charts. If I’m in the shower singing, why can’t this be added to my personal audio history? If a tree falls in the wood, and no-one hears it, does it make a sound? Maybe not, but I’ll scrobble a record of it to Last.fm regardless.

Aside from music, we can save links of web content to Delicious, and our work trips to Dopplr. Now there’s Daytum, created by the brilliant Feltron, where you can input details around any aspect of your life, from the seemingly large scale ‘Gigs I’ve been to’ to the minutiae of ‘Number of Sugars in my tea’. We’re all going life-stats crazy. I would joke that we do this because it’s as if we’re expecting an annual report on ourselves, with all the details of how we’re achieving in comparison to last year, but Feltron actually does that, and it’s amazing.

Perhaps the reason we’re doing this is to do with the retrospective nature of so much of the media these days. Peeking as we are over into the brink of the dangerous 21st century, we do so love to wallow in the past fifty years, more so than is probably healthy. If we’re so obsessed with everything people did in the recent past, imagine how fascinating we’re going to be to youngsters in thirty years time! That’s a good insight, I’m going to put it as my status. As my friend Matt said recently on Twitter. “Years from now, when people ask ‘where were you when Michael Jackson died?’, I’ll have a Brightkite link showing precisely where I was.”