My kids have a music player called Yoto. It takes little cards which tells it which playlist to use. This is easy for kids to understand, and lets them listen to stories and music without adding more screen time. The cards don’t actually store the music, just tell the player where to download it from.
My wife recently realized we had quite a few of these cards now. So she bought this:
The future is here, and it looks a lot like the past.
On that one hand, that’s kind of cute and cool. But on the other, I find it a bit depressing that the main difference between this and CD wallets of the past is that the CDs actually did store the data.
With the CDs, you literally were holding the information, and you could use it as you wish without reliance or permission from anyone else. Whereas the cards, as you say, they just point to where the data is. You still need to rely on a whole chain of different services to get access to it. Access can be revoked at any time, either deliberately, or by some error, or by some critical service shutting down. It’s just like the past, but worse. Isn’t it?
Yeah, pretty much. In their defense they’re more resilient to greasy kid fingers and being dropped behind the couch, but I still wish the data was actually stored on the card, or on some form of local storage. We had an mp3 player with an SD card before that, but then you can’t switch playlist as easily.
My kids have a music player called Yoto. It takes little cards which tells it which playlist to use. This is easy for kids to understand, and lets them listen to stories and music without adding more screen time. The cards don’t actually store the music, just tell the player where to download it from.
My wife recently realized we had quite a few of these cards now. So she bought this:
The future is here, and it looks a lot like the past.
On that one hand, that’s kind of cute and cool. But on the other, I find it a bit depressing that the main difference between this and CD wallets of the past is that the CDs actually did store the data.
With the CDs, you literally were holding the information, and you could use it as you wish without reliance or permission from anyone else. Whereas the cards, as you say, they just point to where the data is. You still need to rely on a whole chain of different services to get access to it. Access can be revoked at any time, either deliberately, or by some error, or by some critical service shutting down. It’s just like the past, but worse. Isn’t it?
Yeah, pretty much. In their defense they’re more resilient to greasy kid fingers and being dropped behind the couch, but I still wish the data was actually stored on the card, or on some form of local storage. We had an mp3 player with an SD card before that, but then you can’t switch playlist as easily.
The past is now.