David Pogue's story in Thursday's Circuits about the Apple GarageBand software got my attention.  Mr. Pogue is a musician, a pianist with a lot of history in musical theater, and his article is a hymn to the possibilities of GarageBand:

For $100. . ., Apple will sell you a four-octave, touch-sensitive MIDI keyboard that produces no sound of its own. But when plugged into GarageBand, its plastic keys trigger (from the Mac's speakers) the sound of a $50,000 Yamaha grand piano, an orchestra full of strings, the brassy sting of rock-hall trumpets, or any of 185 other sampled instrument sound variations.

At this point, GarageBand is a 64-track digital tape recorder. The program can even count you in with clicks - the software equivalent of, "And-a one! And-a two! And-a three! And-a four!" - and provide a metronome as you play.

I can hear his excitement.  This is neat!  This makes it possible for everyone to be a composer/arranger/producer!  Boy, this is going to be fun.  And, in fact, he goes on with an enthusiastic "this is neat" set of paragraphs:

In the "American Idol" era, it's clear that commercial talent, if not great musical talent, is always out there, untapped and undiscovered. How can a gifted singer or talented play-by-ear instrumentalist reach what could be a grateful audience? Not by mailing out demo tapes recorded with the church accompanist, that's for sure.

It won't be long before the GarageBand creations of no-name singers and players start popping up on Web sites - indeed, it won't be long before Web sites start popping up just to accommodate them - bypassing the talent scouts and gatekeepers of the American recording industry. GarageBand and the Internet give tomorrow's stars their own democratic recording and distribution channels.

...[W]hen you consider both the fledgling state of the 1.0 version of this program and the immense musical and commercial forces it could one day unleash, you might conclude that there is, after all, an i-name that might have suited this remarkable software: iPotential.

Mr. Pogue is excited, and he is convinced that this software is going to change the musical world.  It's got a low pricepoint, it's usable by regular people, and it's flexible (though too focused on pop sounds -- Mr. Pogue wishes for a solo violin once in a while).  I'm with him.  I get excited about this stuff too, and I truly believe (I believe!) making these tools available removes the mystery and perceived expense of making your own music.  I can imagine zillions of arrangements and magical new tunes being released into the unsuspecting cybersphere, to be listened to and shared by everyone.  Go, Apple!

So tools are emerging that let us manipulate all kinds of content.  We can carry video around with us, make it ourselves, share it.  We can do almost anything with music.  We can take pictures, morph pictures, phone pictures; watch television on our phones, watch ourselves on our phones, download scenes of other people talking on their phones, walk down the street talking on the phone and sending pictures.  Complete flexibility.

But there were two (maybe three) stories in today's paper that make this flexibility seem like jangling, meaningless chatter.  One was about Wal-Mart locking in employees over night:

For more than 15 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has locked in overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. It is a policy that many employees say has created disconcerting situations, such as when a worker in Indiana suffered a heart attack, when hurricanes hit in Florida and when workers' wives have gone into labor.

The other was about a woman who has stayed on the outskirts of the job market for thirty years, working hard but never being promoted, always falling into problems that are caused by her other problems.  She loses her teeth because she's poor, and because she has no teeth she doesn't advance.  She moves from place to place to find work, and because of these moves her disabled daughter can't make any progress.  She just can't seem to get a break.  When social workers get together to try to figure out how to help her take care of her daughter, the one thing they don't consider is calling her employer to ask that she be put on a regular shift:

She asked a supervisor and got brushed off, but nobody else -- not the school principal, not the doctor, not the myriad agencies she contacted -- nobody in the profession of helping thought to pick up the phone and appeal to the factory manager or the foreman or anybody else in authority at her workplace.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable and beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law permeates the culture of American antipoverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. . . . Wages and hours are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal.

Putting these two strands together makes you ask what new tools could emerge online that would actually affect the lives of people in Vermont or Maine that can't make enough money to move through life comfortably.  They're isolated -- they're in places without real jobs -- but they have phone lines.  They don't care too much about morphing video or scoring a demo tape (maybe they do).  They need actual jobs.  What does this cyberlife do for them?

Finally, the third story, in Adam Liptak's review today of three books about the AOL/Time Warner merger.  His characterization of Kara Swisher captures the jangling sound I'm hearing this morning:

Her book sometimes reads like comments from the dais [at an internet business conference]. ''I am still a believer,'' she writes. ''In the wake of the crash, true faith in the eventual dominance of the Internet is not an easy thing to admit to. In fact, largely because of this one disastrous deal, saying you believe in the Internet as a revolutionary medium is a bit like admitting to a capital crime.''

. . . [T]he title ["There Must be a Pony In Here Somewhere"] captures something of Swisher's own attitude. She remains, she says over and over, thoroughly optimistic about the transformative power of the Internet.