Embracing new technology isn't always a reality for everyone

I did something Saturday afternoon that's become as antiquated these days as the rotary phone: I spent time browsing in a brick-and-mortar record store.

I'm not an early adopter -- not even close. Part of it's age, part of it's money (if it's free I'm your beta tester), but I generally don't hop on the newest, hippest thing like my life is dependent on it. Funny analogy, as one's individual livelihood is today fundamentally dependent on various facets of technology. That being said, I just stopped buying CDs a few years ago. I only buy them now used, and if the price beats Amazon's and iTune's for a full album.

I'm reading All Song's Considered's Bob Boilen's article about abandoning a hard drive-based library in favor of Apple's cloud service, something I feel a little uneasy about doing, though I suspect I will have to eventually. About the change, he says:

"Abandoning the way I've come to listen to music over the last decade feels like a big experiment, but in some ways, the decision was a long time coming. I've been close to maxing out the hard drive space on my laptop for a while, and in a single day this week, I reclaimed nearly 200 gigabytes. [...] I'll miss the physical, the tangible, but that's been feeling like a thing of the past anyway ... I still miss liner notes, still wish digital would have more information to read while I'm listening and not sure why we haven't all kicked up a bigger fuss about that. Streaming my collection or curating a playlist or a few dozen playlists and having knowing they'll be there when you go to listen is an issue of trust. Right now, I feel like trusting."

I like having the actual artifact, whether it's a physical CD, or my own hard drive, but I have a wall of stuff I never bothered to rip because I simply don't have the space. I'm not ready to delete an entire library of music -- a lot of which I don't listen to online in the first place -- but resistance is usually futile when it comes to technology. The bigger issue I have is accessibility: there are still people in the Us without a speedy internet connection, or can't afford to upgrade to newer, better computers. Granted, this symptomatic of a larger problem, but the "all or nothing" approach to embracing the latest new thing doesn't work for everyone.