Throughout our class, we have seen numerous ways in which people’s attention has been managed by others, and how people seem to lose some their own authority and control over the choices they make, and the habits they form. We face this on one level by the constant advertising barrage we encounter wherever we turn. Ads are an obvious attempt to catch people’s attention (at least briefly) and persuade them to buy something or do something they ordinarily might not think of buying or doing. Through Carr’s The Shallows, Miller’s Segregating Sound, and Sterne’s MP3, we see more insidious ways of controlling people’s attention and gaining authority over them on a long-term basis. One example is through the advances made in sound and sound recording. The people who controlled the distribution of recorded music shifted at least some of the authority and control away from people wanting to listen to music. Miller describes how the talking machine companies recorded certain types of artists from certain parts of the United States and around the world. They therefore were picking and choosing for people what music they would listen to. They had the authority. As Miller points out, “phonograph company scouts imagined they were introducing modern technology to isolated, primitive people around the world” (Miller, p. 177). In the United States, the South had been pretty much ignored as a market for talking machines and the music being distributed. For example, in the trade journal Talking Machine World “previous attention to the South…had been intermittent and usually consisted of anecdotal depictions…” (Miller, p. 199). The phonograph companies were driving what people heard and by whom it was recorded. Carr describes how the internet began to “take over the work of our traditional sound-processing equipment” (Carr, p. 84), and how “it’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions” (Carr, p. 89).  Once again there is a shift in authority, and a dependency on what could be created and distributed through the internet is created. Another example by Carr is the Kindle, on which people can download and read almost any type of publication, including MP3s. It kind of takes away our need to think about how we’re listening to music, once again weakening our own authority. Miller goes even further to analyze how with MP3 music, “new technologies are no longer confined to a single application, to a single sector; they are disseminating and interpenetrating the whole economy” (Sterne, p. 203). However, Sterne’s book also seems to suggest how the MP3 is giving authority back to the people, in the form of massive file-sharing. This seems like a good example of the “information wants to be free” phenomenon. So do people have much of their authority back? I’m not so sure. It still seems as though we are being driven by our devices such as cell phones, MP3 players, Kindles, computers, etc., and I’m not sure how much of that is of our own free-will. We seem to have lost our desire or ability to have “quiet time” and to think for ourselves. As Sterne points out, “other musical ideals – portability, modularity, malleability, access – have replaced contemplation” (Sterne, p. 239). His words echo much of Carr’s book, in that we are losing our ability to control our own attention and part of our own lives – so much of this is being done for us by the digital world. As happy as I am to have our digital devices, it makes me sad to think that we might be losing our ability to stop, listen to music in our own quiet space, and really think about what we are listening to instead of having it as a frequent backdrop.