I think our minds crave order, we want to see patterns in the most random events. Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his essays, spoke about being in a cave once, in which the roof was covered with glow worms. Looking up in the dark of the cave each worm was a dot of light above. It should have looked like a starry night but it didn’t. It looked… strange. It looked that way because each dot of light was the same distance away from the other, the glow worms having staked out territories of pretty much the same size. When we look up into the night sky, the stars are distributed in a random manner, there is no pattern. But the night sky looks less strange to us because our mind seeks to put it into patterns. There is no order to the stars that make up the Big Dipper, or Cassiopeia, but we see the patterns they form and it seems ordered to us.
The reason I’m thinking about this randomness is because of iTunes. Some days I swear it has it’s own agenda. It doesn’t, of course. I don’t know about the programming that drives it in shuffle mode, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t "think". That iTunes doesn’t wake up and say "You know, I’m in the mood for The Ramones today." So why does it seem that way at times? Why does, on some days, iTunes seem to play every strange and obscure tune in the Library? Why three Tragically Hip songs in a row, so that I actually check to see if it has somehow switched off of Shuffle? Why a set of Blues? Because my mind wants to make order out of a random selections of songs.
I don’t remember much from my Statistics class in university. I found it confusing, and it didn’t help that I could barely understand the prof’s accented speech. But I do know that I can roll six sixes in a row with dice, because they are independent random events. Rolling one six doesn’t effect the probability of the next throw of the dice, each throw being an independent event. So it really shouldn’t surprise me that my random music, while seemingly ordered is not.
But it does seem that way, and I find myself wondering what iTunes has in store for me today. Maybe I should just choose one of the play lists?
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I’m just glad that my mind isn’t the only one searching for meaning in the randomness of the iTunes shuffle. Ah, this modern world.
Ahh… what I really wonder about is what is the difference between shuffle and party list. As both seem (at least to me) to have their own agenda as well.
The other things our minds do Liza is ignore the “random” moments, and noticed the seemingly ordered ones. It usually escapes our notice when the shuffle plays away, not placing three songs in a row by the same artist or all jazz tunes. It is kind of the equivalent of how we pay great attention to the fellow who has the bad feeling and doesn’t board the aircraft that crashes, but we ignore the ones who don’t board the airplanes that safely land at their destinations.
Kennie, Party list is a little different than shuffle. They are both random players but Party list can be programed to play just higher rated songs, or songs from certain playlists etc. And it does have an agenda, it’s just not saying what it is 🙂